While there may be some cases in which it is good to wait, generally the answer to this question is - YES! While you absolutely do not need an evaluation to get started with remediation, it can help guide treatment and answer many questions for you, as parents as well as for the clinicians working with your child.

Often by the time a student is suspected of having a learning disability, parents or caregivers have already gone to great lengths to support their child. Many have hired tutors or had teachers spend extra time with their child over the summer to no avail. So often families ask us how academic therapy or dyslexia therapy is different from what they have tried in the past. This is a wonderful and necessary question.

The best place to begin is to identify indicators of a potential learning problem. Think about it this way; if you have a student who has average to superior intelligence, has intact sensory perception (e.g., ability to see words on the paper and hear words) and has been instructed in reading and writing by a competent teacher for months or years, but is demonstrating a significant discrepancy between their IQ and their academic achievement, it is time for an evaluation.

Our top five homework strategies to decrease that nightly homework battle, especially if your child is struggling with a specific learning disability like dyslexia.