How can I write down steps for my experiment with dyslexia and how it impairs a child mental development?

Question

My hypothesis is: "If children have dyslexia, then they will have an inability to read words and learn." With a hypothesis such as this, how can I form steps for such an experiment? I need help! Please help me.

Answer 1

I would go to the library, and look up dyslexia/learning experiments in the psychology journals there. If you find one or two articles published in academic journals, they will describe how the experiments were conducted and you can base your model on that.

In general, psychology experiments involve the test subject group and the control group. You would have to define the age and characteristics, such as dyslexia, and how this was determined.

I imagine you would have 1-3 word lists of 5-20 words each, depending what age children or students you are testing. These words could be written on notecards or read on a recording. The children would either be shown the cards to read out loud, or would hear the words and write them down. There would be one part of the exercise where the words are presented with the right answers given, a second part where the subjects write or speak the words along with the answers being given at the same time, and the third part where they are tested for being able to read and/or write the words by themselves, based on the same cues as before, but without the answers given.

Then you could quantify the responses based on how many right and wrong or how long it takes the children to read or write them.

This is a very vague example, and could leave room for other learning issues besides the dyslexia affecting the outcomes. Technically, you would have to eliminate or isolate other possible factors, such as attention deficit or test anxiety, but you could show that dyslexia "interferes" or "correlates" with difficulty in learning. It could still be that the kids without dyslexia are taught independent study and practice skills, or the kids who test for dyslexia could have other issues instead of or besides dyslexia that are causing the learning difficulties.

I think a better way to control it would be to show kids' learning ability before and after being shown ways of studying and practicing so they can learn words successfully. If you showed the low retention and recall when they were given words on their own, and then showed a sharp increase in performance when they were given special assistance to study and practice in between the initial run and the test run, that might still show that left to their own devices, the dyslexic students have difficulty in contrast to the true capability they have when given the means or assistance to study words and retain and recall them later.

Answer 2

hmm...sorry, this isn't really a hypothesis though. What variables are you changing? All you did was define what dyslexia is already known to be.

You need to actually make an experiment on dyslexia like "If children with dyslexia are given rose-colored glasses, then the number of words they read correctly will increase"

(I've read that rose lenses can help improve ppl's reading ability if they have dyslexia).

Then you need to make up a way to test your guess, like by having a control (kids w/out the glasses) and an independent variable (wearing rose glasses). good luck!