The Simple View of Reading (SVR) proposes that reading comprehension depends on two general processes –language comprehension and word recognition– and that the contribution of these known processes to reading comprehension varies in time. Specifically, the contribution of word recognition decreases, and the contribution of language comprehension increases with student progress. The purpose of this study was to test the SVR in a large sample of 4,750 Dominican public-school students from second (n = 2,399) and fourth grade (2,351) and determine the contribution of phonological awareness within the SVR. The study found that word recognition and language comprehension explained 80% of the variance in reading comprehension regardless of grade. A quantile regression showed that, as reading comprehension progresses, language comprehension’s predictive power increases, and word recognition’s predictive power decreases. A structural equation model conducted on each grade separately showed that the contribution of word recognition toward reading comprehension remained stable between second and fourth grade. This means that, although the dynamism of the SVR components follows the same pattern reported in the literature, the students evaluated here might reach reading automaticity later than expected. Therefore, more attentional resources need to be allocated toward decoding. The study found that the contribution of phonological awareness toward word recognition increases from second to fourth grade, confirming that students are taking longer than expected to obtain reading automaticity and still going through an overt effortful decoding stage rather than a covert phonological recoding stage, making reading more effortful.

El trastorno del desarrollo del aprendizaje con dificultades en la lectura, o dislexia del desarrollo, es una dificultad de tipo neurobiológico, crónico y con un componente genético que afecta a la funcionalidad de lectura y que, por sus consecuencias escolares, emocionales y sociales, constituye un problema de salud pública que merece una especial atención sanitaria y educativa, para cuyo abordaje es imprescindible conocer el tamaño de la población afectada. Para poder llevar a cabo una estimación de la prevalencia de dislexia en la Ciudad de Panamá, se efectuó una evaluación individualizada de los niños y niñas de una muestra intencional de 216 estudiantes de 4° a 6° grado de Primaria pertenecientes a escuelas públicas y particulares. Se halló una prevalencia de 5.56% de dislexia, sin diferencias relevantes entre géneros y entre sistema educativo público/particular. Se relacionan los resultados con los de otros estudios similares efectuados con participantes de lengua española y se discuten las proporciones encontradas de subtipos de dislexia.

Background: The purpose of the study was to determine the psychometric properties of the Dominican System for Measuring Early Childhood Development (SIMEDID, for its Spanish acronym), to adjust the sequence of item presentation, and to provide age-standardized norms for each item, to enable policy and program managers to make decisions based on specific and structured data. Methods: After approval from an ethics committee, a total of 948 children from 0 to 60 months participated in this study. Participants were evaluated on four early childhood development domains (gross motor, fine motor, language development, and socio-emotional development). The data were collected from November 2021 to February 2022, either at early childhood care centers or at home, using mobile devices that guided the evaluators through the screener. Data were later synced to a global database. Psychometric properties were calculated using Cronbach’s alpha and split-half parallel reliability. For reorganizing item presentation and to obtain age-standardized norms, we conducted a logistic regression analysis for each item on dependent variable item success, and independent variable age. Results: The instrument showed excellent reliability and additional evidence of validity. The item presentation order was rearranged according to the probability of item success progression. In addition, the study characterized the expected evolution of item success probability across participants' age. Conclusions: SIMEDID is a valid and reliable instrument for depicting childhood development in national evaluations. Its integration with electronic platforms for national monitoring represents a cost-effective, time-efficient screening tool adapted to the Dominican sociocultural context. This represents a promising tool to strengthen strategies that support early childhood development.

No abstract

Se ha descrito la relación existente entre rendimiento lector y desempeño académico, así como el impacto que sobre ambos tiene la vulnerabilidad socioeconómica del niño/a. No existe, en cambio, abundancia de literatura sobre el impacto del nivel socioeconómico en la presencia de dislexia del desarrollo. Sobre una muestra de 216 escolares de Educación Primaria de escuelas públicas y particulares de la Ciudad de Panamá con la presencia de 12 participantes con dislexia, se estudiaron las variables de rendimiento lector, categoría socioeconómica y rendimiento académico. Aunque no se encontró en el presente estudio una relación directa entre el nivel socioeconómico de los participantes y la prevalencia de dislexia, pareciera que el grupo situado en la parte más baja de la escala ve triplicadas sus probabilidades de presentar el trastorno, en comparación con el resto de la muestra. Los resultados indican una relación más lineal entre el nivel socioeconómico y el rendimiento lector, así como el impacto negativo que la dislexia y la baja competencia lectora tienen sobre el rendimiento académico. Se propone la hipótesis de que los resultados podrían concordar con la presencia en el trastorno disléxico de un componente neurobiológico y genético, pero cuyo impacto podría ser modulado en intensidad por el componente ambiental y se reflexiona sobre la porción de bajo rendimiento escolar que podría evitarse con políticas activas de abordaje de la dislexia