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:)

Week 9: Announcement!

Greetings Everyone!

I have a great announcement to make! On April 29th, 2017, I will be holding a Dyslexia Awareness Fair. The goal of this event is to help inform the public about dyslexia. We will also be having several  booths with games that will promote knowledge about dyslexia and we will be doing free dyslexia screening! I am very excited about this event because we will be able help others who may be unaware of such a wide-spread problem.

During the week, I spent my time making flyers and meeting up with my mentors to discuss the details of the event. We also finalized our scaling system for the questionnaire. This was a BIG milestone in our project because now we were able to accurately analyze our collected data! And as we had concluded earlier, our data proved that our questionnaire was able to pick up dyslexia in a child.

Hope to see you all at the fair!

Until next time, 

Ritika Gupta:)

Week 7 & 8: Difficulties & Fixes

Greetings Everyone!

      The last two weeks have been very busy and rewarding for this research. I am aware that there is no blog for week 7 and I had a reason for that. During week 7, I had hit a wall in my project. There were many difficulties that were causing me to put the project on a pause. And I wanted to combine week 7 and 8 to describe what happened and how it was fixed.
      So let's rewind a little bit. During Week 6, I had finally gotten two dyslexia centers to cooperate with the research. They had agreed to letting me to test my questionnaire on their students. I was very excited by this achievement; however, one of the dyslexia centers decided to discontinue themselves from the agreement. I was slightly bummed but still happy that I had partnership with at least one dyslexia center. Fast forward to Wednesday of Week 7: The center emailed out all their parents about my research asking if they would be willing to help. A few parents responded, but it was not enough to gain data for my research. At that point, I was stuck; I wasn't sure on what to do. It also didn't help that the test run we were simultaneously conducting was not working at its full potential due to some issues.
     Okay...enough with my sappy sad story of week 7. Let's just take Elsa's advice and 'Let it go!'

#Sorrynotsorry

      In research, there will always be a time where it seems like you have hit a dead end. Trust me, that's a good thing, because that lets you know that the research is working. It also taught me how to solve problems and move forward. Persistence and optimism were the words of the week.

Week 8: 'After a storm, there is always a rainbow'

      During the weekend between week 7 and week 8, I sat down and analyzed all the problems. And I came up with several solutions and new ideas. (See, troubles aren't so bad). One good thing came out from my brainstorming was my idea of running three different tests simultaneously. Initially, we were only running the test to calculate our positive predicted value. But after researching more about the dyslexia center, I learned that the center not only tutored children with dyslexia but also other learning disabilities. So I decided to test the negative predicted value and the false positive value. This opened my research to a bigger audience at the center, which increased the amount of data I collected this week. 

      I was a common visitor at the learning center this week. Every day for an hour, I would sit in the center and ask the parents if they would be willing to fill out the questionnaire. The parents were very supportive and were quite happy that I was carrying out such a research that would potentially help other kids from saving them from the problems their child faced from a late diagnosis. With the data that I collected, I was able to say that our questionnaire does not pre-assess for other learning disabilities besides dyslexia. But also, my data showed that we may have to tweak the questionnaire to make the pre-assessment more accurate for dyslexia. Thank you so much for tuning in! I am so excited to see where this research will go from here.

Until next time, 

Ritika Gupta:)

Week 6: Connections and Progressions

Greetings Everyone!

      This week was a very exciting week! My job this week was to talk to dyslexia centers and inform them of the research that I was part of. We were seeking their cooperation in order to increase the number of participants that have dyslexia. Out of the six centers I called, I was able to get two dyslexia centers to agree. (One said no and the other four still have to get back to me).

      With the two dyslexia centers in agreement, we are planning to give the questionnaires to the participants next week. I am excited to be getting more data and seeing where our questionnaire holds. With our current data, it seems like our questionnaire is pretty accurate. We have tuned some parts of the questionnaire to make it more precise and straight to the point. We also have reduced the number of questions to make sure that the parents and children can finish the test within 15 minutes--usually the time spent in the waiting room before the doctor's appointment. The current test of the questionnaire is also to confirm whether the changes we have made make a positive impact on the data.

Thanks for tuning in!

Until next time,
Ritika Gupta:)

Week 5: A Positive Direction *fingers crossed*

Greetings Everyone!

Honestly, I am surprised that is now Week 5. Gosh! Time has been flying by. But good news for all of you...I think my project is going in a positive direction!! YAY!! 

So what have I done this week??

Good Question! This week I had two main tasks at hand. First, start the testing for the negative predicted value of our questionnaire. Second, call dyslexia centers to use their students for our research. I also had a meeting with my faculty advisor, Ms. Gelblicht!

How'd it go??

I think it went well! I tested our screening tool on three kids who have dyslexia and our tool said it to be positive. But currently, the data is slightly skewed, because the kids have been receiving tutoring for their dyslexia and so they know tricks and tips that help them deal with their dyslexia. To fix this problem, I am going to be talking to a psychologist to use his patient's. The benefit in this will be that when the psychologist diagnoses his patients, he can then give them the screening questionnaire that I have been working on. This way we will remove the variable of how long the patients have been receiving tutoring for dyslexia. 

Dyslexia centers also seem to be interested in the research! So let's see how that goes!

Can't wait to share my progress with you all!

Until next time,

Ritika Gupta:)

Week 4: Just the Basics

Greetings Everyone!

Week 4 hasn't been the most eventful but was quite essential for my research. 

So to recap, I am working with my pediatrician and a dyslexic tutor to create a screening tool. When I joined the research. Version 1.0, 2.0, and 2.1 had been created and were somewhat in the process of being tested. My role in the research has been in the updating and the testing of Version 2.2 and 3.0. 

The questionnaire consists of three sections: 1. The consent form (very important!), 2. Parent Questionnaire, 3.  10 Matching Sounds Questions.  

This last week I spent my time researching the science and thinking behind the Parent Questionnaire. Becky gave me a very large binder that consisted of training material for a dyslexia tutor. It had loads of information about how you diagnose a child of dyslexia. A 4-inch binder that was filled with papers to the brim and was worth over $700. If you are thinking what I am thinking, then yes it was filled a lot of VALUABLE information. One really fascinating thing I learned was that a kid's handwriting can hint whether they have dyslexia with signs such as the shape of the letters, and how the words and letters are placed on the paper. (Reading the binder took me about three days to finish.)

Thanks for tuning in:)

Until next time, 

Ritika Gupta:)

Week 2 and 3: Many Things

Greetings Everyone!

Week two and three of SRP is complete! YAY!

       Last week, I administered several CTOPP-2 tests on 5 and 6 year olds. That of in itself was interesting. So to get you all onto the same page. The CTOPP-2 test is designed to assess the phonological awareness processing abilities related to reading in students from 5-24 years. It is a standard norm exam so that means that it compares your level to see whether you are very poor, poor, below average, average, above average, superior, or very superior to other people your age. There are ten areas that are tested in the CTOPP-2 exams: Elision, Blending Words, Sound Matching, Memory for Digits, Non-word Repetition, Rapid Digit Naming, Rapid Letter Naming, Rapid Color Naming, Rapid Object Naming, and Blending Non-words. The goal of all ten areas are to see the strength of your phonological awareness and memory.  

       So the CTOPP-2 takes about 45 minutes to administer and it consists of me asking the questions to the child and he/she responding with the answer. Well in one of the cases, it took me 2 hours to carry through with the test. My experience with that kid was very interesting. To describe this kid in one sentence, he was a very sweet kid with an abundant number of stories. Every question that I asked him would remind of another story that he wanted to tell me. He was also very squirmy. Several times throughout the test, I was worried that he might fall off the chair. (Luckily, he never did!) I don't think it helped that he had drank a huge glass of soda before coming into the doctor's office:). But after all the troubles, we ended the exam and he left with a great score on the test and two lollipops in his hand. (I low-key had to bribe him to finish a little faster.)

      Another incident I had with a patient was the complete opposite from the prior. This patient completed the exam fully within 35 minutes and at times rolled his/her eyes at me saying that all the questions were super easy. I found this entertaining because he/she would smirk a little right before they would answer the question. But luckily, I was able to get on their good side by offering them a lollipop. 

       My experience with the kids is great, I get to learn their personalities and observe their strengths and weaknesses. Most of them are 5, 6, and 7 year olds who are in school and are discovering who they are. This has also taught me how important it is to have patience even when the child is being one tough customer. Overall, I love what I have done so far!

       Besides the CTOPP, I did other things as well. Last weekend, I went to a conference held by Dyslexia Pros. Extremely Educational!! I learned about what has been implemented so far to help people with dyslexia out. I was introduced to many apps and services that provide great help to the dyslexic community. The conference also helped me to discover more about how a dyslexic's mind works in a classroom environment. One example I was given was how a dyslexic reads. **Note to readers: Please keep in mind that there are different levels of how dyslexic someone can be** The example I was given was of someone with a medium level of dyslexia. 

Please read the following:

Deisxyla is crieeactazhrd by dffilticuy wtih lennraig to raed flteinuy and with aactucre cromheopisnen dsitepe normal icltienegine. 

(Dyslexia is characterized by difficulty with learning to read fluently and with accurate comprehension despite normal intelligence.)

        How did that go? For sure, it gave me and my spell check a headache. Now imagine what a dyslexic person goes through when they are required to read a book for school or read the instructions at the top of their homework. It's frustrating and nevertheless hard. Many of the kids get discouraged and don't finish their homework because they simply don't understand what they have to do. And if they do know what to do, it takes them twice as long to finish it. Laura, the speaker at the conference, explained that with some tweaks in the educational system could help make it a nearly perfect learning environment for kids with or without dyslexia. Some fixes such as allowing kids with dyslexia to use I-pads or tablets at school and allowing them to type up their homework and use audiobooks to help them finish their work faster. This by no means would make the child addicted or dependent on technology, but instead would help aid the child to gain their success in learning. 

         I also learned from the conference that Steve Jobs was dyslexic. Therefore, he required all the Apple products to come preloaded with functions to help aid people with dyslexia. Most of the added functions can be found in Settings>General>Accessibility. Another thing that I found fascinating was that many companies that hold dyslexia tutoring are pushing for legislations to be passed to make sure that all school require their students to get tested for dyslexia. 

Certificate for Dyslexia Conference

         I am so happy that I got this wonderful opportunity to learn so much about dyslexia. Shoutout to Dr. Khurana and Becky. Thank you!! 


Can't wait to share more with you all!

Until next time, 
Ritika Gupta :)