CAPSTONE OUTLINE

1.   Dyslexia Plus: A New Website built on squarespace   –   By Cy Simonsgaard

2.   Overview of contribution

A.     I chose my topic of finding what science says are the most efficient ways to teach students with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD) to Read because for many years, the only sources of information I had for my own daughter’s journey were advertisements or research I could conduct on my own.  This isn’t a topic that even the neuropsychologists, therapists, or advocates in our life knew how to remediate when what was being used in the school setting wasn’t working.

B.     Synthesis of key research findings: I included 21 peer-reviewed articles researching the most efficient methods to teach students with IDD to decode and read. Both Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs were used, as were pretest-posttest, and posttest only group design.

                i.          20 looked at the effectiveness of specific reading interventions.

              ii.         16:20 resulted in mild to moderately effective intervention successes in decoding. All of these 16 aligned with NPR report recommendations for multicomponent reading intervention based in phonics, all addressed phonological and phonemic awareness skills, all employed explicit, direct, systematic, individualized instruction in small group or 1:1 settings.

             iii.         Of the 4 unsuccessful experimental design articles: one was a whole word intervention, one was Grace Fernald’s Multisensory Method, and two were researcher designed mixed-multicomponent and multisensory interventions.

C.     Professional Contribution

                i.         I created a multi-page Squarespace website titled Dyslexia Plus that will be available online after finish of term at DyslexiaPlus.org. It is a free resource intended to continually expand as parents and educators share the best, most current proven methods to teach our students with IDD to decode and read.

              ii.         I’ll “share screen” to take you through the highlights of the pages. I’ve purchase DyslexiaPlus.org for the next year as a test run and will “go live” soon.

3.   Successes – Getting each tiny detail to work! From color, to images and videos, to buttons and links, even line spacing! Then getting everything in order so that it might be useful to a desperate parent or teacher visiting the site.

4.   Challenges —  I am a complete luddite. So everything was a challenge.  I began by googling, “how to learn to use Squarespace”.  Time was a huge challenge, the extraordinary number of decisions that go into creating a website, editing for conciseness.  Many challenges, but worth it to know how to build a site and work with my research in a different way.

5.   Advice — Choose a project that is meaningful to you and that you will actually use –or that truly ignites your interest. And if you choose something outside your comfort zone, assume it will take double the time you think it will,,,especially if you are over 40ish - Life doesn’t remember you are back in school!

6.   Q&A