Speaking of Psychology: Dyslexia myths, misconceptions, and facts, with Tim Odegard, PhD

Dyslexia is one of the most common learning differences, potentially affecting up to one in five people. Yet it’s still widely misunderstood. Tim Odegard, PhD, talks about how dyslexia is diagnosed and defined; his own experience growing up with dyslexia; how kids at risk can be identified early; what interventions work best; how reading difficulties can affect mental health; and why talking about the “gifts” of dyslexia can be problematic.

Tim Odegard, PhD, professor of psychology and Katherine Davis Murfree Chair of Excellence in Dyslexic Studies at Middle Tennessee State University, is a renowned expert in dyslexia research. He is a developmental cognitive psychologist whose work centers on reading difficulties and dyslexia, including the identification of struggling readers, effective intervention methods, and comprehensive teacher training.

Kim Mills: Reading is a skill that many of us take for granted, but for millions of children and adults, it can be a daily struggle. Dyslexia is one of the most common learning differences, potentially affecting up to one in five people, yet it’s still widely misunderstood and misdiagnosed. Today we’re going to talk to a psychologist who studies dyslexia and reading difficulties about the state of dyslexia science. What causes dyslexia? How is it diagnosed and how early can we identify it? What interventions work best to help people with dyslexia learn how to read? How do reading difficulties affect mental health, and what does the research say about how families, educators, and schools can best support struggling readers?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.

My guest today is Dr. Tim Odegard, a professor of psychology and the Katherine Davis Murfree Chair of Excellence in Dyslexic Studies at Middle Tennessee State University. As a developmental cognitive psychologist, Dr. Odegard studies how to identify struggling readers, what are the most effective intervention methods, and how can teachers help dyslexic students. He has written dozens of peer-reviewed articles and serves as editor in chief of the Journal Annals of Dyslexia. Dr. Odegard also brings personal experience to this topic, having been diagnosed with dyslexia himself. 

Dr. Odegard, thank you for joining me today.

Tim Odegard, PhD: Thanks, Kim. I’m really glad to be here today with you.

Mills: You’ve written and spoken about your own experience with dyslexia, and I’d like to start there. Tell us what it was like learning to read for you and how did those early experiences influence the work you’re doing today?

Odegard: Well, learning to read for me was extremely difficult, and it’s also important to highlight that spelling is a real challenge for those of us with dyslexia as well. So reading and writing are really challenging. 

Dyslexia really emerges in the early grades, so for me, when I was in the readers, it was fairly straightforward when I was able to listen to other children and the teacher read words—and a limited number of them—memorize those and masquerade as if I was really reading and pronouncing those words. I understood the book if I heard it read to me, but it was really hard for me to pronounce the words. So I really masqueraded for quite a while, until it really became apparent that I wasn’t able to read the words for myself and I was really memorizing them. It’s a strategy that many of us use to kind of hide in the distance, in the background, until we’re uncovered.

So it definitely started in third grade where my formal testing happened, and unfortunately because of the methods used at the time when I was being identified, I never got a formal diagnosis of dyslexia. They knew I couldn’t read very well, but my IQ testing was way too low. So the model that was being used at the time, the IQ discrepancy, limited what I was able to do. So that was kind of my early childhood was struggling, getting the testing, thinking that help would be on the way, and then actually being denied the services through the IDEA federal regulations here in the United States.

Mills: Let me back up a minute. You said your IQ was much too low. Don’t you mean your IQ was high and your reading comprehension was the problem?

Odegard: No, actually, so that’s a good way of highlighting that. In the discrepancy model, what you want to find is somebody who has an IQ that suggests their potential. A way of measuring a person’s potential—in the United States in particular—for a long time is high enough to say that we’re really going to be able to achieve more than what we’re showing in an academic area. For me, it was reading and spelling. They knew that my reading and spelling was well below average, but my IQ test wasn’t that high in the average range. So when you looked at the difference, there wasn’t a big enough span. So the logic at the time was is if we’re not able to perform on this one test, an IQ test, high enough to show that we have greater potential, then what we’re experiencing are expected underachievement, it was expected that I would struggle with reading because my intelligence wasn’t high enough to allow me to do more.

Mills: I see. Now for our listeners who are new to this topic, can you briefly explain what dyslexia is? I mean, are most reading difficulties due to dyslexia or is it just one thing among many that can cause reading problems?

Odegard: It’s one thing among many. We’ve now really identified that dyslexia is in this pantheon of language-based learning differences, and what dyslexia really impacts is there’s a select few of us who have challenges with reading and spelling words accurately, developing efficiency with reading individual words, and that will then impede our ability to read text fluently. So at the basic literacy skills level, we really show up and are identified. This typically is something that comes up early because it’s in the most basic skills in reading and writing, so reading words and spelling words, that we show our deficits.

But there are other challenges with language learning that really can present in different ways and cause different types of outcomes, and it’s not uncommon for those of us who struggle to read and spell words to also have issues with other things, larger language differences. Developmental language disability is one of those types of differences. There’s a high co-occurrence of kids who struggle to understand how we put words together to make meaningful utterances, phrases and sentences and paragraphs, as well as kind of how to comprehend the language on a more general level, the oral language.

Mills: Is there any connection between dyslexia and the ability to read numerals? I mean, if you can’t distinguish letters, can you still distinguish numbers?

Odegard: That’s a good question. So there is a link between dyslexia and the ability to do math, but it’s not necessarily on those numerals. Since the primary driver of dyslexia has not been identified to be a visual-based one, learning numbers is—isolated units and being able to distinguish those—is not typically a challenge for those of us. I’m a good case of example for something else you might think would be a challenge, which is learning to read the musical notation, because I’m a musician and I went to college on a music scholarship and I play multiple instruments. That was not a challenge for me. So that’s kind of a misnomer out there that it might be challenging for us to do numbers or even learn how to read music. Because it’s often thought that we see letters backwards, but that is actually a myth that’s been out there. What we often have is limited exposure to print text, and when you have limited exposure to text, it delays your ability to develop the visual representations to see those letters and see them properly. So we’re just developmentally delayed in that. The real nexus seems to be in how we process language as one of the primary drivers very early in life we can find those types of things with us.

Mills: What do we know about what’s going on in the brain that causes dyslexia? I mean, if you do an fMRI of a person with dyslexia, does their brain look different?

Odegard: It does. I’ve actually done some of the original research in this area with my own brain imaging research and others, and that’s continued. We typically say that it’s the left language centers in the brain that show underactivation as well as a lack of interconnectivity, kind of functioning as a network, if you will. We used to think that we knew a lot about it in the sense of it clearly looks like this is the signature. It does have a neurobiological predisposition that can increase the likelihood that we present. We find that through genetic studies, but most importantly, family risk studies, having a first degree relative with dyslexia is a really strong risk factor, but the brain signature really is one that we’re still grappling with what it means. Some of the most important work in here was done by a colleague of mine, Nadine Gaab, as well as Ola Ozernov-Palchik up at Harvard and MIT, and what they were really showing is even before you are in school, even before kindergarten, kids at high family risk will show specific differences in brain structure as well as brain function, and those differences at three and four will actually predict a child’s later ability to read words accurately and efficiently.

So we do know that there’s a brain basis. What we think we used to know about is architecture and what it looks like has really been reshaped by modern neuroimaging.

Mills: I said in the intro that dyslexia may affect up to 20% of people. Is that accurate, and is that number changing over time? I mean, it seems to me that we have better diagnostics than we had when I was a kid. I mean there was nothing called dyslexia. We didn’t know that at all. Some kid couldn’t read, the kid was thought to be not very bright.

Odegard: Right, and that’s actually one of the misnomers that we try to dispel with the term dyslexia, which is a person can be bright or exceptionally bright and still struggle to read and spell words. The 20% prevalence rate really depends on how you decide where to cut and determine the severity that you expect someone to present with, and the identification model. The challenge with dyslexia is, like with many conditions, is it’s on its severity. We’re talking to people about psychological science and psychology. Mental health is on the severity. Your depression can be major depression. You could have dysthymia, which is just to say a mild form of depression. We often forget that even in the DSM-5R, the diagnostic manual for mental health, we’re dealing with spectrum conditions or continuum, conditions that are on a continuum. So I like to say that, because sometimes people will use what I’m about to say kind of against the term of dyslexia.

It’s on a continuum of severity, just like many conditions are that we consider, we often identify it as a discrete category, meaning either you have dyslexia or you don’t have dyslexia. What that presents as a challenge, which is in the school-based setting or a private practice with a neuropsychologist or a clinical psychologist or some other professional who can do identification, we think that we’re going to come up with a black or white determination, but how severe you want the child’s reading and spelling difficult to be and how you identify them will really determine what the prevalence is.

And so we could be anywhere from three to 5% if we come in and actually look at who doesn’t respond well to intervention and are really persistently poor responders, that’s about three to 5% of the population. Or if we come into a population and we look in a school-based setting across a district or a state or even a region, as I’ve done in my research, we might find as many as 20% or even more kids who are struggling with word reading and spelling. It’s all about how we define it and how we set the threshold for who we’re going to say categorically has a specific learning disability and reading that we call dyslexia. And I think that’s true of many other conditions, and so it shouldn’t be used as ammunition to say that somehow dyslexia is not real, otherwise depression’s not real because depression also is on a continuum.

Mills: Right. Well, let’s talk about how dyslexia is diagnosed. You’ve written about a long history of problems with diagnosis that have left many people failing to get the services that they need, and often those are people with less privilege to begin with. Can you talk about where we are today in terms of identifying young people with dyslexia?

Odegard: Correct. I’ve identified historically that on average even independent of those challenges, we’ve had issues with an underidentification, especially in Texas for example, where I reported that the number of students being identified with dyslexia under state law there was zero. Which is really important because there’s been kind of a misrepresentation of dyslexia being really way overidentified and actually being misclassified away from other categories. My published research on this looking at actual state records shows that on average, a few years ago, there were only zero kids on a high school campus that were being identified with dyslexia. So it’s a real challenge for all children. This isn’t just like a Black or Brown problem or a rich or poor problem, and that’s really pushed this upswing in advocacy and legislation around dyslexia around the country, because it’s really a global issue that affects all of us.

Some of the challenges we’ve experienced is it’s hard to identify who really has something that you would call a disability versus the context they’re in. Since we have such a challenge in many contexts with a lot of kids struggling to read and spell words, some of my research that I’ve also published shows it up to 65% in some underperforming poor schools. Some of these schools are almost predominantly white schools sometimes, or they could be a mixture of different ethnic groups. This is really a problem for all. It really makes it challenging for teachers—who are you going to say are the even 20% of those kids at the upper limit who have dyslexia when the majority of your students can’t read and spell words? So identification in a sea of struggling readers is one challenge that I’ve talked about and highlighted, that if we don’t get basic literacy right in the early grades, it creates this upper elementary, middle, and high school problem of so many kids are struggling that we can’t identify the exceptional ones who have this difference that set them up to struggle to begin with.

That’s one challenge, context matters. Second, the identification model you use also matters. I grew up poor and white in a family that was blue collar, so I didn’t perform well on an IQ test for real reasons. My vocabulary and my language development wasn’t necessarily in an enriched environment with college educated parents around me to support me for doing well on that test. And so when we take an IQ index as an indicator of who will and will not qualify for services for dyslexia, a form of a specific learning disability, then it really sets up a discrepancy between who will and who will not—the haves and have nots—for that category. So that’s a challenge.

Then another model that’s been used is, well, we put them in really good instruction and we see who responds or who are the persistently poor responders. We’re going to use what we call the instructional discrepancy. We put everybody in good core instruction for English language learning—how to read it, write it, spell it, and understand it. We see who is struggling to learn those skills and from those kids we’ll flag those who are going to come out and are going to be tiered up for getting intervention and a label of a specific learning disability like dyslexia.

The challenge there is that we’re struggling across the United States to actually implement English arts really, really well in schools, and when we struggle with teaching reading, then we create the disconnect between our ability to use an effective identification model based on instructional discrepancy to find kids. What that does is it pushes those of us who know better and can do better and have the resources to go outside of the school, and we get psychologists, diagnosticians and others to do independent testing. We come back into the schools and we say, look, my kid can’t read. They’re struggling. They’re way behind. They’ve been showing up to school. What are we going to do with it? This looks like they have a disability of some type.

So you can see that there’s really some challenges that we present across the board, and what I want to highlight is elevating instruction for all across all schools is going to create the context we need to identify those of us who are set up to struggle and need more instruction intervention to begin with.

Mills: How early can dyslexia be identified? Are there signs as soon as kids start learning to read or does it manifest even earlier than that?

Odegard: That’s a great question. The answer to that is yes, and I want to explain that. Yes, one of the challenges we have is how we define dyslexia will always be with its primary characteristics. Again, if we go to that tome called the DSM-5, you’re going to open it up and there’ll be a list of symptomatology, what it’s supposed to look like. There’s normally five to seven things. That’s really important because if you’re not manifesting those, you might have a predisposition neurobiologically for something, but you may not actually present the symptoms. What we know is we can find risk of dyslexia really early. I highlighted something earlier, a first-degree relative with dyslexia is a high-risk indicator that it might be difficult for you to struggle with reading and spelling later on in life. That means at conception, we know if a person’s at an increased risk to struggle with that ability.

The challenge is until we get into formal schooling and we’re now expected to be able to read and spell words, we can’t struggle. So you can’t present with the symptoms of dyslexia until you’re expected to read and spell words. That makes sense. So until then, what we can do is we can find risk early—general language abilities at 2 and 3 are another risk of two things, dyslexia as well as symptoms of developmental language disability, so you can have more of a general broad language problem. And we’ve known this historically. We knew that late talkers and other children who were presenting with some early language problems or issues with potentially having problems later on with reading and spelling.

Now, once we get to be a little bit older, we can start looking at print skill development. Is it hard for them to learn their letters and names? Is it hard for them to learn how to put letters and names to speech sounds that they go with? That’s another indicator. We can start to look now at something that language begets, which is our ability to do rhymes and hear the rhymes within words to pull out the sounds within words. So once we get up to 3 and 4 and 5, we can start to find those weaknesses. We also know that our ability to name objects and use that part of our language system is also a reliable indicator of aspects of reading ability.

So when we start to see these early indicators, what we’re doing is we’re increasing the risk indication, almost like we’re doing a heart checkup every year at our annual physical where we’re asking these questions and the more questions you answer yes to and we take some blood work and the more blood work says that you have risk, the higher risk indication is that you’re at high risk for heart disease in the future. Up until we’re expecting kids to read and spell, we can find risk of dyslexia, which means that we can start to intervening in helping them develop the language and print skills that they need to be successful later when we expect them to be able to read and spell words.

Mills: You mentioned having a first-degree relative with dyslexia. Do you have first-degree relatives with diagnosed dyslexia?

Odegard: That’s a great question, Kim, and I think it goes back to something you said earlier. We come from different generations, so that means that my parents likely were not in the context in their poor, blue-collar upbringings and where they were at to be able to identify them with dyslexia. So a challenge that we don’t have as much anymore since we have more awareness and we’ve been identifying a lot more people is we’re finding those. Did I have a parent who really didn’t like to read and wasn’t very good at it? Yes, I did. Did that parent have an identification of dyslexia? No, they did not. So I think that we have that generational factor, but I think today we have a much different situation where it’s more likely with awareness, which is really important, and I thank you for allowing me to have this space to talk about dyslexia, that it’s more common to be able to say yes.

So my son did have a first-degree relative that had dyslexia—me. He also had an aunt, my sister, who had issues with reading and spelling words early in her life as well. So we knew, and I did early preventative work starting at birth with his language development to set him up for success. Even with all that effort, we got to the end of first grade and reading and spelling words was really, really hard for him despite his enriched environment, despite having two college-educated parents in the home, despite being exceptional in doing very well on an IQ test. This time around that generational difference between context is so important. You can see it so well in my story with my son. He aced the IQ test. He was exceptional in the IQ test. All of his language development in so many ways was okay, but it was still hard for him to learn and spell. So he got 2 years of a really intensive structural literacy intervention that helped to set him up. He’s still disfluent, which is often a common problem, and he also struggles with spelling still, which is often a lingering problem.

Mills: But for parents who are listening, you don’t have to feel guilty if you’ve done all that, you still don’t have the wherewithal to necessarily beat it.

Odegard: Exactly. I think that’s really important, and some people have pushed to get rid of dyslexia as a term or the category. I think it’s really important to note that the lingering lifelong impact for some of us are still there. I didn’t get the intervention, I compensated. I’m called a compensated dyslexic. My spelling is really, really, really atrocious still. My ability to read fluently is still really, really hard. So reading anything that’s not within my area of study that I have a deep memory for and understand the structure of it really, really well is really challenging for me. So now that we have things like audible and other services, I consume a lot of print through audio, which has been great for me because it means I can keep up with readings, but it doesn’t mean that I want to read for pleasure because it isn’t pleasurable for me to read. But I enjoy listening and reading. There’s a few books that I’ll read. I read a lot for work. So I think it’s important for us not to get rid of at least this idea of dyslexia because the persistent challenges with spelling and writing are real as well as the persistence—the disfluency is often something that lingers and that will create lifelong opportunities for us to overcome.

Mills: Let’s switch gears for a minute and talk about interventions. What are the kinds of interventions that are effective that really work, and do most educators have access to these things?

Odegard: The answer is no to the last one. Most educators don’t have access to them nor the training it takes to do them well, which is going to be developing knowledge of the English language and writing system as well as supervision and how you deliver these. Not surprisingly, since I’ve highlighted the whole time that dyslexia is really this basic reading problem with reading and spelling words, that it’s going to start with looking very much like primary reading, where we’re going to be teaching letters and sounds and how to put those together, how to read simple words.

The challenge with English as a writing system is it’s a very complex writing system, which means that our words also have other layers. It’s not just about the phonics of sounding words out. It’s also knowing that there’s words that are going to have larger letter patterns in them that are going to go to a pronunciation and it’s not going to comply with this, A says “ah,” or A says “a,” or A says all five things. It’s a really bloody thing. It also says—so the challenge is, is that it’s not just that letters or even a couple of letters like digraphs—C-H goes “ch”—or tri graph—T-C-H goes “ch.” It’s even more complex than that.

So the English writing system of how we take sound and put it into print is quite challenging. So for doing a really good version of dyslexia when you have kids that if you teach them the basic stuff, they just don’t automatically apply that to more complex word reading. Many of us will take more complex word instruction as well as meaning instruction, and it needs to be implemented in a way that gets us lots of practice, reading words, reading words in sentences, reading words in text, and of course the ultimate reason why we read is to understand what someone’s trying to tell us. So we have to embed that within lots of opportunities for us to read and apply what we’re learning to read words and then also spell words to understand text.

Mills: How can having dyslexia affect a person’s mental health, especially when we’re talking about children and teens in school settings?

Odegard: Well, this is really important and something that’s had a lot of increased awareness. Now we’re actually redoing the definition of dyslexia out of the International Dyslexia Association, and one of the drivers for that was, in the original definition that we had from IDA from back in 2002, we would talk about secondary consequences. If you’ve highlighted, I’ve been talking about word reading and spelling, accurately efficient word reading, meaning we can read them quickly and then text fluency, the ability to fluently read texts with expression. We would highlight secondary consequences. If you can’t read text and do it well, it’s probably hard to understand what someone’s saying because you’re spending so much of your time and resources and psychological energies trying to read the words, so by the time you get through, you’ve forgotten what the whole thing was about. Another secondary consequence is when we’re not being exposed to print, we’re not being exposed to the rich language and words that people are going to use, so our vocabulary can lag behind as well.

Well, we had named those kind of academic areas of secondary consequences. What we now have a preponderance of evidence for is that mental health really tanks in those of us with dyslexia. We feel a lot of shame. We feel a lot of guilt. We don’t feel good about ourself, so we have low self-esteem, our ability to think that we’re capable of doing things, so what we call our self-efficacy is also impacted. And there’s stigma associated with a label of disability, which in the public, you already highlighted, they often think means that we’re not very smart, that we’re incapable of doing anything more. So it’s a real challenge.

So what we’ve seen now is there’s been multiple studies of studies, we call them meta-analyses, where we go out and people look at 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 studies. When you look at people who have language-based learning differences, the two that have been studied the most are developmental languages, disability as well as dyslexia. We have an increased incidence, prevalence of depression and anxiety in particular, so we’re a lot more likely to have major depression. We’re also much more likely to have issues of anxiety. Now, those are what we call internalizing conditions. We internalize those, we bring those in, we fill them inside of us about how we feel, how we process the world, how we process ourselves.

There’s also evidence that we have increased externalizing problems, which is to be a conduct problem, to be a behavioral problem, to be a problem in school, to be a problem in life, to get wrapped up in the penal system and be winding up in prison, for example. There’s also evidence for that, but the reason for that seems to be the fact that when you come in and experience the chronic stress of going to school every single day from early in childhood and not having the ability to do what your peers do, to be labeled as stupid, to be labeled as dumb, to be laughed at, to be heckled, to read in front of a class. It’s not like trauma with a big T, but it is what we call chronic stress.

Mills: Yeah. There’s a popular narrative that dyslexia comes with special gifts like creativity or out of the box thinking. What does the research say on that front?

Odegard: Well, the research is incomplete and ongoing. However, the research that’s been done to date would say that this idea that there’s like four or five superpowers that dyslexics have—this not kind of panning out for us right now. Take creativity. There’s been two recent studies of studies, meta-analyses, that show that individual dyslexics on measures of creativity aren’t showing any kind of ability that’s any greater than just the general population. Visual spatial processing is also thought to be one of those. The anecdote that’s often given is to say that, Oh, people who are astrophysicists over index for people with dyslexia, and they would use that anecdotal evidence or that kind of constrained way of saying that, Oh, this must be a superpower. Well, when you look at objective measures of visual spatial processing and you pull those research studies together and look at them in a meta-analysis, we don’t see evidence that we have increased visual spatial processing. If I’m not mistaken, when I did the review and published it on this, we actually saw that there might be evidence of a little bit lower performance in some of the studies for those of us with dyslexia, but that washes out. It’s kind of like no difference.

The entrepreneurism is a really interesting one. I was listening to David and Goliath recently from Malcolm Gladwell. He features as one of the underdog stories those of us with dyslexia. It’s a really compelling narrative to say that we have superpowers, and Malcolm Gladwell definitely highlights this. The challenge is that the methodology that’s been used from a psychological science perspective on the entrepreneurial research is less than optimal, and we’re not really doing it well. Does it mean that the case studies that we have, like a Steve Jobs for example, or Richard Branson, aren’t high achieving people who identify with, who also have shown that they have these great strengths and gifts? That’s definitely true. They can definitely also be role models for certain people. So that one is one that’s kind of like more research is needed, especially with better methodology.

The artistic pieces too was often one, the great artists of the world are thought to be dyslexic. So here’s the challenge with that is, and you did highlight that, and I’m not a clinical psychologist, I’m a psychological scientist, and I was trained historically in what we call social cognitive as well as developmental cognitive perspectives, and a really important piece out of that research literature is the idea of stereotypes. So the thing about a stereotype is that’s when we paint a group of people with a limited set of traits or abilities or qualities that is not true of all of them uniformly, but might be true of a few of them selectively. We normally think about these as negative.

We also have positive stereotypes, and so the way that I think about the gift of dyslexia narrative is it’s actually told typically in society is that when we limit the ability for us to be exceptional to this four or five things that we say is going to be true of all of us, that’s by definition a positive stereotype. And stereotypes, and even positive stereotypes are also a pathway to negative thoughts about oneself. Because what does it mean? When I was doing one of my first brain imaging studies and a little girl started crying when she was in the mock scanner—a mock scanner is a mockup of an MRI scanner. I had one of my assistants in there taking this little girl to the procedures. I was sitting with the mother in the waiting room. We could watch what was happening through a window and we were talking about it, and I turned to the mother and said, We have to stop the experiment. And she says, Why? I said, Well, she’s crying, and this isn’t about what we want as adults. It’s what’s best for her and her psychological well-being. This is clearly an adverse situation for her. She said, Give her a second, and the little girl stopped crying, and then she started smiling, and then she got right back into the mock scanner and she went on it.

She says, Well, here’s the thing about her is since she’s been identified and diagnosed with dyslexia, she’s also learned that dyslexia is supposed to be a superpower, and she hasn’t found her superpower yet because she’s not good at art. She doesn’t want to go off and be a businesswoman. She’s not really great with creative thinking and out of the box thinking, and so all these stereotypic things that she was supposed to be good at, she was good at none of them. But I would say that she was the bravest little person. I knew she was willing to do what with grown servicemen and women who were coming in for my DOD-funded research into the same mock scanner would crawl out of the scanner, would be hyperventilating, would be so afraid to do. There were these grown men and women who went into combat and there was this little girl who would fearlessly get into that scanner and why she was crying wasn’t out of being in there or doing the unknown. It was because she was afraid that she wasn’t a good dyslexic.

Mills: Wow, that’s tough.

Odegard: That’s tough, right? That’s the definition of a stereotype right there, and I saw as a junior faculty the negative impact on this precious girl who was fearless, and we often joked it was like if they showed up with one teddy bear or stuffy, then we thought we’d get them through the scanner because it’s scary to go into an MRI. If they showed up with two stuffies, it took two stuffies to get out the door that day to come and do the research, we knew that we were going to have to stop the study, it wasn’t going to work. But she was fearless. This little girl, it took no stuffies for her to be there. Her dad or mom didn’t have to go into the scanner bay with her and hold her foot for her to be safe or comfortable in there.

Mills: Well, just to wrap up, what’s next for you? What are you working on now?

Odegard: Oh, that’s a great question. I think what I’m working on now really is the translation of psychological science and the science of reading and the science of learning out there into the world to educators. And in particular a role that me and some others play is trying to think about how do we take all these policies that we have across the United States, how do we recalibrate them to do more effective screening, to do early risk identification early, maybe even in preschool—with some states that I’m working with, using more broad language screens so we can look at their greater risk indicators, pull them into early intervention and actually help the kids who have less susceptibility, have better outcomes, and then freeing up the resources when we get to second, third, fourth, and fifth grade to give the more intensive intervention to those who we couldn’t identify earlier and help to lessen their outcomes later on.

So I’m really working in this space of translation and communication as well as policy advocacy. Not myself, but working with the advocates and the state houses around the country to help them reframe and rethink the dyslexia legislation and how do we be doing something more expansive? We don’t do well at screens for language, and when we don’t screen for language, that means that a lot of kids who are going to struggle with reading comprehension, who have a developmental language disability, they won’t be identified. There’s a real need for us to think about how we bring our screening practices that have been motivated by legislation over the past 10 years into a unified system that’s screening for language risk, that’s identifying kids who are going to struggle with reading comprehension as well as reading the words and get the supports that they all need in there in place. That’s what I’m working on.

Mills: Well, that sounds really important and I want to thank you. This has been great information. Thank you not only for talking to me, but for sharing your own journey.

Odegard: Well, Kim, thank you so much for helping to raise awareness. I feel so honored to be able to share this in this space. Thank you so much.

Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you’ve heard, please follow us and leave a review. If you have comments or ideas for future episodes, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman.

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.