Preparing for College With Dyslexia

Dyslexia is a learning disability that makes it hard for kids to read. The workload in college can be challenging for teens and young adults with dyslexia, but they can prepare by practicing using reading strategies and tools while they’re still in high school.

Fortunately, college accessibility laws ensure that students with disabilities, including dyslexia, receive necessary accommodations. Individual therapy and emotional support can also be a helpful aid. Here are key challenges and strategies for dyslexic students to thrive in college:

Time Management

Managing time in college can be tricky for all students, especially those with dyslexia. With fewer daily classes and less structure, it's easy to fall behind. While typical classmates might have no trouble catching up before a test, dyslexic students may struggle due to their slower reading pace. This is why — though it might not seem like the most obvious challenge — students with dyslexia need to be aware of the need to manage their time very carefully.

Parents can help by encouraging their child to create a weekly schedule, balancing study time with other commitments. This habit can help students understand how they use their time and ensure they allocate enough time for assignments. By practicing these skills at home, students can better manage their time in college and stay on top of their workload.

College Level Reading

College-level reading presents challenges for students with and without learning disorders. The complexity and amount of reading often surpasses that of high school materials in addition to higher vocabulary being used.

While in high school teachers might have provided students with a list of vocabulary words and definitions ahead of time, college professors generally do not. Additionally, college reading material is often not from textbooks that provide comprehension questions, making it hard for students with a learning disability to monitor their own comprehension. A commonly used strategy called SQ3R can help with this challenge. SQ3R stands for Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review.

Technology Supports

Technology offers valuable support for students facing challenges with reading. Text-to-speech software can be particularly beneficial. Many of these programs allow students to highlight text on the screen and transfer these highlights to a document for later study. Also, built-in dictionaries enable students to instantly define unfamiliar words.

While colleges are not mandated to provide such software to students, many institutions do offer them. If professors assign textbooks, publishers sometimes make electronic versions of them that are available only to individuals with disabilities (meaning that they’re not available for purchase to the general public). The disability services office will order these e-versions from the publisher for students so that they can use them with their reading software. In these cases, students still have to pay for a copy of the book (no one gets out of college without paying for books!).

Spelling Challenges

Students with dyslexia often have weak spelling skills. While high school teachers may choose not to penalize spelling mistakes, colleges may instead offer students the accommodation of a laptop with a spellcheck feature for exams. Students may not have much interest in this accommodation, it is important that parents emphasize to them how the use of such a tool may actually help to present work of the highest possible quality. Studies have shown that students with learning disorders that affect their spelling found that even when the content of their responses was of equal quality, the work that contained spelling and other errors received lower ratings than those of the general population. Parents should get their student accustomed to using a laptop with a spellchecker for high school exams so that they are ready to work this way in college.

Supports for College Students with Dyslexia

Getting accustomed to these strategies and tools in high school may seem like a lot of work to students with dyslexia who may be holding their own without them. But it’s important to let them know that the challenges they will face in college are different, and the more prepared they are before they get there, the more confident and comfortable they will be. With preparation and an understanding of what the college environment is like, they should be able to learn effectively and be successful at showing what they know.

At Tampa Pediatric Psychology, we offer psychoeducational evaluations to identify learning disabilities, dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia as well as processing disorder concerns, executive functioning disorder concerns, and other factors that may impact a student’s educational progress. If your child is entering college, a psychoeducational evaluation may be beneficial in securing necessary college board and university accommodations. Reach out to our team of licensed child psychologists to inquire.