Week 10: Is This the Ending?

Greetings Everyone!

This week was my last week with the official SRP! I ended a week later than my other classmates because I held a Dyslexia Awareness Fair this weekend. I have many details to share from this event!

Three weeks ago, I had discussed with Dr. Khurana that I wanted to hold an awareness event for dyslexia. I initially wanted to do a presentation about dyslexia, but realized that I would not get a venue at such a short notice. After brainstorming, I came up with the idea of the Dyslexia Awareness Fair. Most of my week went into prepping for this event! On Tuesday, I drove around Queen Creek and placed flyers wherever I could. We had printed 200 flyers and I was able to place 150 flyers!! I was proud of that achievement, but slightly worried that because I placed the flyers 4 days before the event, we wouldn't have a great turnout. But...I had nothing to fret about because our event was very successful. At our event, we had free dyslexia screening for the public and some games for the children! Because there was only Dr. Khurana, Becky, and I running the event, we divided the work to match our expertise! I was in charge of giving the questionnaire to the parents when they walked into the office, taking them back and placing them in a room, calculating the score on the questionnaire, and notifying Becky what rooms each patient was in. Becky's job was to screen the patient's with a more thorough screening tool and talk to the patient's about the results that came from both exams. Dr. Khurana would then go into the rooms and discuss with the parents about how to get further testing and how to get their children tested through school and how to get IEP's for their kid(s). At times, patients would have to wait about 1/2 an hour to get their screening done. But because the kids had some games that they could play while they were waiting, no one was bothered by the wait. Our target for this event was children, but we even had adults come to get tested! At the end of the event, I was happy that I was able to help out many people who would have (maybe) otherwise gone undiagnosed. Many parents even asked if we would be holding another event like this!

I have many people to thank for this event! Dr. Khurana and Becky, thank you so much for supporting me throughout the entire process of creating this event and for all the handwork, you guys put into the event. Maria, thank you for printing all the flyers and buying all the materials for the games! And thank you to my supporters who gave me ideas and inputs to make the event so successful.

I would like to end this blog, with my takeaway from the SRP. Dyslexia affects 20% of the population and only 5% are aware that they have dyslexia! Many children go undiagnosed because healthcare professionals and teachers do not get trained to diagnose dyslexia. And even though, children with dyslexia show very obvious symptoms, the lack of awareness makes dyslexia go under the radar! With my role in the SRP, I was able to make a questionnaire that demonstrates accuracy in pre-assessing kids for dyslexia! I am glad that my efforts played a role in increasing awareness for dyslexia and help the dyslexic kids get the help they need.

Initially, I was told that I would just be testing Version 2 of the questionnaire and comparing the data with that from the CTOPP-2 test. But it didn't go as planned, it went way better. When I started Dr. Khurana had goals for me to complete testing the questionnaire. As she saw my work potential, she left the path for the questionnaire up to me to decide. I was able to take the research to a broader scope and bring this questionnaire to other dyslexia/learning centers and schools. Currently, we have grown to have connections with 5 other corporations (starting from 0). But I wouldn't have had this opportunity if Dr. Khurana and Becky had not started the research themselves. Thank you once again for this amazing chance! I will continue with the mission of bringing awareness to dyslexia!

Thank you for following my blogs!

Signing out,
Ritika Gupta:)