A new procedure to measure children's reading speed and accuracy in Italian

Abstract

Impaired readers in primary school should be early recognized, in order to asses a targeted intervention within the school and to start a teaching that respects the difficulties in learning to read, to write and to perform calculations. Screening procedures, inside the primary schools aimed at detecting children with difficulties in reading, are of fundamental importance for guaranteeing an early identification of dyslexic children and reducing both the primary negative effects--on learning--and the secondary negative effects--on the development of the personality--of this disturbance. In this study, we propose a new screening procedure measuring reading speed and accuracy. This procedure is very fast (it is exactly 1 min long), simple, cheap and can be provided by teachers without technical knowledge. On the contrary, most of the currently used diagnostic tests are about 10 min long and must be provided by experts. These two major flaws prevent the widespread use of these tests. On the basis of the results obtained in a survey on about 1500 students attending primary school in Italy, we investigate the relationships between variables used in the screening procedure and variables measuring speed and accuracy in the currently used diagnostic tests in Italy. Then, we analyse the validity of the screening procedure from a statistical point of view, and with an explorative factor analysis, we show that reading speed and accuracy seem to be two separate symptoms of the dyslexia phenomenon.

Word Reading Fluency as a Serial Naming Task

“…In other words, oral reading fluency tasks confound both accuracy and comprehension with the construct we advocate here, namely cascading efficiency. This makes them appropriate for the identification of children with reading difficulties (e.g., Arnesen et al, 2017;Baker et al, 2015;Morlini, Stella, & Scorza, 2014), as differences between groups with and without dyslexia exhibit maximum effect sizes for text fluency measures, compared to other phonological, reading, or spelling measures . If, however, one is interested in the efficiency of processing word sequences, an approach to fluency that is stripped of accuracy limitations and comprehension confounds may be preferable.…”