Introduction

1. Girls are better, even girls with dyslexia?!Gender differences in reading performance of teenagers with and without dyslexiaDr. Anita Blonk Dr. Anna BosmanUniversity of Nijmegen Department of Special Education A.Blonk@ped.kun.nlA.Bosman@ped.kun.nl

2. Introduction Students with dyslexia are often regarded slow learners. Despite intensive reading and spelling instruction, and practice, they appear highly resistant to intervention activities, as indicated by the fact that their reading and/or spelling levels generally remain at a significantly lower level than that of students without dyslexia.

3. Protocol Dyslexia Secundary Education (to appear in 2004) The main goal of the protocol is the incorporation of special facilities for dyslexic children in every-day practice in different types of secondary education. To be able to help all students with dyslexia, it needs to be established who has and who has not dyslexia, since that is not yet clear when students enter secondary education. The protocol also includes a procedure for the classification and diagnosis of dyslexia. It includes for instance three tests and a sample of a questionnaire for the assessment of dyslexia in primary school.

4. Gender differences A different prevalence of dyslexia is often cited for boys and girls: ratios differ between 2:1 and 9:1 more boys suffering from dyslexia. Women perform significantly better than man on reading related tests (for instance Marlow et al. 2001)

5. This study: Materials Three, newly developed reading-related tests for students who have just started secondary school (authors: Henneman, Kleijnen, Smits): • silent-reading task: three minutes of silent reading. • a spelling task: 12 sentences composed of words with increasing complexity (“het wonderlijke weer”, = “the surprising weather”). • Writing task: copying a sentence as often as possible in two minutes (cf., Hatcher, Snowling, & Griffith, 2002).

6. This study:Participants

7. Results of the reading-related tasks of all participants : reading task

8. Results of the reading-related tasks of all participants : spelling task

9. Results of the reading-related tasks of all participants: writing task

10. Conclusions • Significant differences between girls and boys and between schooltypes for all tree tasks: • Girls’ performance is better than boys’ for all three tasks: writing, spelling and reading • Except for spelling and reading at VWO type (no difference) • All three reading related tasks differentiate between schooltypes: VWO >HAVO >VMBO

11. Comparison of participants with and without dyslexia certificate

12. Performance of boys and girls with and without dyslexia certificate

13. Conclusions • Significant differences between the performance of boys and girls without dyslexia certificate • Same difference in performance for writing: the difference is 14, but not significant (due to smaller group) • less differences between performance of boys and girls for reading (mean difference of 45) and spelling (1).

14. Mean score comparisons on all three tasks between low-performing girls without dyslexia and girls with dyslexia

15. Mean score comparisons on all three tasks between low-performing boys without dyslexia and boys with dyslexia

16. Discussion issues To interpret these data, three issues arise: • What are the implications for the classification of dyslexia? Do we need separate norms for boys and girls in secondary education to obtain a valid comparison with the standard group? • Since performance at the beginning of primary grade hardly differs between boys and girls, we wonder at what age reading-related performance of boys and girls starts to diverge? • Do girls gain more from intervention than boys?