A Longitudinal Examination of the Persistence of Late Emerging Reading Disabilities

Abstract

There are some children who encounter unexpected reading difficulties in the fourth grade. This phenomenon has been described as late emerging reading disabilities (LERD). Using Grade 4 as a starting point, this study examined the reading development of 964 children between kindergarten and Grade 7. The results showed that 72.0% of children had typical reading performance in Grade 4, whereas there was 0.7% with poor word reading, 12.6% with poor reading comprehension, 2.5% with poor word reading and comprehension, and 12.2% with borderline performance. We also showed that there were similar proportions of children who had early versus late emerging reading difficulties; however, most of the late emerging poor readers recovered by Grade 7. Furthermore, our study showed that poor comprehenders showed poorer performance than typical readers on word reading, pseudoword decoding, and spelling between Grade 1 and Grade 7 and poorer performance on a working memory task in kindergarten. Overall, this study showed that most children recover from late emerging reading problems and that working memory may be an early indicator for reading comprehension difficulties.

Longitudinal Stability of Reading Difficulties: Examining the Effects of Measurement Error, Cut-Offs, and Buffer Zones in Identification

“…The customary assumption about the persistence of RD is contested by findings in recent studies on the stability of RD. These studies indicate that in addition to persistent RD cases, there are those with resolving RD (i.e., normal reading skills in later grades despite RD being identified during early grades) and those with late-emerging RD (i.e., RD identified during the later grades despite normal early reading skills) (e.g., Catts et al, 2012;Torppa et al, 2015;Etmanskie et al, 2016). These unstable groups are of particular interest because they may provide more understanding on the developmental risk and supportive mechanisms in RD.…”

Supplementing teacher knowledge using web‐based Intelligent Tutoring System for the Text Structure Strategy to improve content area reading comprehension with fourth‐ and fifth‐grade struggling readers

“…As this study focused on struggling readers, the study sample included all participating students who scored below the 25th percentile on the pretest of the standardized Gray Silent Reading Test (GSRT; Wiederholt & Blalock, ). We opted to use the 25th percentile because many research projects have used that cut‐off (e.g., Eason, Goldberg, Young, Geist, & Cutting, ; Etmanskie, Partanen, & Siegel, ; Fuchs et al, ; Rønberg & Petersen, ; Shapiro et al, ) or the 30th percentile (Wanzek et al, ) for identifying struggling readers to receive interventions. The GSRT was used to select students because it is a standardized reading test with sound psychometric properties.…”

Lexical-Level Predictors of Reading Comprehension in Third Grade: Is Spelling a Unique Contributor?

“…Retelsdorf and Köller (2014) found reciprocal effects between spelling and reading comprehension in German students from grade 5 to grade 7. Other studies have shown that poor reading comprehension can be predicted by earlier spelling ability (Desimoni et al, 2012;Ritchey et al, 2015) and that children classified as poor comprehenders performed below typical readers on measures of spelling (Etmanskie, Partanen, & Siegel, 2016).…”

“…Spelling data were available at only a single time point, so examination of longitudinal predictive relations was not possible. While evidence exists to suggest that spelling is predictive of reading comprehension over time (Chua et al, 2016;Etmanskie et al, 2016;Kim, Petscher, et al, 2013;Ritchey et al, 2015), other research has shown mixed results (Abbott et al, 2010;Desimoni et al, 2012). Furthermore, no studies have examined the longitudinal contribution of spelling while controlling for both word recognition and vocabulary.…”