At Scottish Rite Hospital, our team is committed to ongoing education and research to provide the best care to every patient. Established in 1965, the Luke Waites Center for Dyslexia & Learning Disorders created a program to help identify and treat children with various learning disorders, primarily dyslexia. Throughout the decades, research has become an essential component to help our experts better understand the causes of dyslexia and how to best treat it.

Recently, a researcher from the hospital’s dyslexia team traveled to Toronto, Canada for the 26th annual Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR) meeting. Created in 1993, SSSR includes members from across the globe who collaborate on the scientific study of reading and related areas, such as language and literacy. As an institution dedicated to research, we are proud to have had representation at this annual conference. 

Clinical research scientist Anna Middleton, Ph.D., CALT, presented the hospital’s latest dyslexia research. The project, “Characterizing Treatment Response in a Sample of Children with Dyslexia,” evaluated the reading skills of children with dyslexia and their response to a two-year literacy program. Within a sample of 115 children with dyslexia, findings indicated that the majority of students within the sample master the decoding skills introduced throughout the course of their reading intervention, and that growth in skill also transfers to higher-level reading skills, such as word recognition and reading comprehension. These children are much closer to their typically developing peers at the end of treatment for many reading skills. 

On the contrary, a subgroup of children with more severe deficits prior to intervention progress much more slowly in the development of reading skills. “Our research reflects upon what we know about the learning characteristics of this group of children, how to predict the quality of response early in the course of intervention, and the potential for supplemental instruction that may benefit this more profoundly impaired learning profile,” says Middleton. "Our goal is to give children with dyslexia the tools and confidence to be successful and our research gives us the ability to do that.”

Learn more about the hospital's dyslexia research.