Diagnostic considerations in children with reading disability

Summary Nine out of ten children with reading disability are found to have a basic syndrome consisting of signs related to lack of clear-cut cerebral dominance. Two of these nine children have additional signs suggestive of structural brain damage. One out of ten children with reading disability does not have any of these findings. The methods of detecting these groups are described and therapeutic implications indicated. The data described in this paper have been previously reported in: SILVER, A. A. and HAGIN, R., “Specific Reading Disability: Delineation of the Syndrome and Relationship to Cerebral Dominance,” COMPREHENSIVE PSYCHIATRY, 1, 2 (April, 1960), pp. 126–134. The author is indebted to Dr. Rosa A. Hagin for permission to use this material. From BULLETIN OF THE ORTON SOCIETY, Vol. XI, 1961, pp. 5–12.     

Specific language disability programs in Bloomington,Minnesota, public schools

V. Summary Once we clear out the undergrowth so that the Jungle of Confusion becomes a Forest of Learning, the child with a unique learning style or specific language disability can be invited into it to succeed, to learn and to “become”. There are many ways this child can go through the forest—we can find a guide to take him through, and he will be likely to see only what the guide shows him; or we can allow him to go through alone and risk the chance of losing him; or we can put him in a plane and fly him over so he can see from a distance but never get involved; or we can put him in a car and drive him around the perimeter; or we can set him on a path which will limit his exposure to learning; OR we can teach him to use a compass so he can work his way through with an independent sense of direction and security. If we honestly accept responsibility for our role in the lives of these children, wemust clean up our forest; and, we must teach children how to use a compass (basic skills). As leading explorers of knowledge, rather than merely critics of the negative or headmasters in the function of memory, or prophets of doom, we should give these children basic tools to allow them to learn and successfully develop a capacity for independent living. As Mrs. de Hirsch stated last evening, “children need living models who are intelligent—who have integrity and character”. Yes, they need models to lead them—models who believe in them, who will equip them and then let them honestly“become”. Our challenge is clear—wemust go from materials-centered teaching vagueness to child-centered teaching excellence if this Jungle of Confusion is to become a Forest of Learning. From a paper presented at the Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Orton Society, Washington, D. C., Nov. 14, 1970.     

The care of children with reading disability in Czechoslovakia

Annals of Dyslexia -     

Phonological and semantic priming in children with reading disability

Lexical priming was assessed in children with reading disability (RD) and in age-matched controls ( M = 11.5 years), in visual and auditory lexical decision tasks. In the visual task, children with RD were found to have deficits in semantic (SHIP–BOAT), phonological/graphemic (GOAT–BOAT), and combined (FLOAT–BOAT) priming. The same pattern of semantic priming deficits also occurred in auditory lexical decisions, suggesting that the semantic deficits are not confined to reading. Children with RD also showed less priming than reading-age matched controls, suggesting that their priming deficits are not simply due to lower reading level but are due to the reading disability in particular. These semantic deficits may contribute to both the word reading and the comprehension problems seen in children with RD.     

Phonological knowledge and naming ability in children with reading disability

Children who are poor readers have difficulty naming pictured objects. Their naming difficulty could be a result of inadequate representations of the phonology of words, inadequate processing of those representations, or both. In this study, third-grade good and poor readers were tested on object naming, and, in cases of naming failure, forced-choice recognition tasks were used to probe their knowledge of the phonology of the object names. The two reading groups showed no differences in their ability to select the initial phonemes or rhymes of object names they had not produced spontaneously. Moreover, initial phoneme prompts were helpful for both reading groups. The children differed, however, in their ability to produce words after being given rhyme information. The results indicated that, except in the ability to manipulate explicitly phonological information, the poor readers; performance was qualitatively similar to that of the good readers. It is suggested that training in phonological analysis may help poor readers overcome the deficiencies in establishing and processing phonological representations that lead to their quantitative deficit in object naming.     

Phonological processes as predictors of specific reading skills in children at risk for reading failure

Children at risk for reading disability were evaluated as kindergartners and again as first graders to determine (1) intercorrelations among phonological processing tasks and (2) the relationship of such tasks to word identification and word attack. With IQ controlled, there were no intercorrelations among measures of phonological awareness, phonetic recoding in working memory, and phonological recoding in lexical access. Thus, these results failed to substantiate the concept of a general phonological processing ability. Partial correlations controlling for IQ revealed no relationship between reading and phonological awareness or phonetic recoding in working memory. In contrast, lexical access measures were significantly, albeit moderately, correlated with word identification but not word attack. Word attack and word identification were predicted by different combinations of variables. These results suggest that lexical access ability is an important factor in reading acquisition and that different combinations of phonological processes may be related to different aspects of reading.This research was supported by PHS grant HD 21887 to Bowman Gray School of Medicine and by PHS Grant NS 19413 to UNC-Greensboro Subcontract to Bowman Gray School of Medicine.     

Risk for reading disability as a function of parental history in three family studies

Inverse Bayesian analyses were applied to data from three large family studies of reading disability to estimate the posterior probability that an offspring will be affected, given that a parent reported a history of learning problems. Prior analyses presented elsewhere (Pennington et al., 1990), suggest that family transmission in these three studies is consistent with major gene or polygene influence. Posterior probability rates are presented in this paper for male to female sex ratios of 3.5:1 and 1:1, with population incidences estimated at 0.05 and 0.10. Results indicate that offspring risk rates are significantly elevated if a parent reports a history of RD. Specifically, an offspring's risk was increased 2 to 80 times over population expectancies when there was an affected parent. While the posterior probabilities and relative risk rates were fairly similar across studies, there was also some variation, which may reflect the different genetic mechanisms operating in these families. This study concludes that both absolute and relative risks are sufficiently increased in families with RD parents to warrant use of family history as a component in clinical evaluation. It is also evident from these results that consideration of the apparent mode of genetic transmission in families may provide even better information as to offspring risk, when family history is obtained.     

The effectiveness of Orton‐Gillingham‐based instruction with Singaporean children with specific reading disability (dyslexia)

This article, written by Assistant Professor Noel Chia from the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and Professor Stephen Houghton from the Centre for Child and Adolescent Related Disorders, University of Western Australia, reports an empirical evaluation of a one‐year Orton‐Gillingham instruction based reading intervention programme. The programme was conducted with 77 (61 male and 16 female) Singaporean primary school‐aged children with dyslexia and a pre‐test/post‐test experimental group design was incorporated into a hybrid multiple baseline to inform analysis. A multivariate analysis of variance revealed a highly significant main effect for pre‐post on the composite dependent variable made up of word recognition age (WRA), word expression age (WEA) and sentence reading age (SRA) scores. Univariate F tests revealed significant improvements in WRA and WEA. These effects were modest (7% and 8% variance accounted for, respectively) but high enough to be considered educationally significant. There was no main effect for SRA and no main effect as well as no significant interaction effect for teacher, indicating that teacher was not a moderating variable in the gains made on the subtests.     

Familial patterns of expression of specific reading disability in a population sample

Summary A sample school population of 75 family units of equal size was investigated for expression of specific reading disability. 25.3% of the total children showed specific reading disability as defined in this study. By using spelling achievement as the criterion for the presence of the disability, the incidence of the disorder was shown to be much higher in certain families than in others, with clear sibling aggregation. The siblings of specific-reading-disability cases demonstrated lower spelling competence than the total siblings in normal families, even when well above a crippling level. Both within individual families and by grades, the spelling rating in relation to grade norms of the specific-reading-disability family cases with their siblings tended to decline with age, in contrast to normal families where it tended to improve with age. This pattern was even more striking if the greater language competence of females, now quite generally accepted and further supported by this study, was taken into account. It was demonstrated that the above patterns were not primarily a product of intelligence level or teaching methods. The bearing of these findings on the tenability of the most common, current hypotheses concerning causation was briefly discussed. From the Language Clinic and Division of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital.     

The cost of technology integration on Filipino families with children enrolled in public schools

Asia Pacific Education Review - One of the characteristics of a 21st-century learner is being technologically adept. Technology has a significant contribution to modern-day education in the heyday...     

Validity of school history as a diagnostic criterion for reading disability

In order to assess the validity of school history information as a diagnostic criterion for reading disability, reading performance data from 304 children with a positive history for reading problems were compared to those from 319 children with a negative school history. These children are members of twin pairs who are participants in the Colorado Reading Project (DeFries 1985). A multivariate analysis of variance of Reading Recognition, Reading Comprehension, and Spelling subtest scores from the Peabody Individual Achievement Test (Dunn and Markwardt 1970) yielded a highly significant (p <0.001) difference between groups for both the multivariate and univariate comparisons. The difference between the unweighted mean scores of the school-history positive and negative groups for Reading Recognition was 2.1 standard deviations. Moreover, when discriminant weights estimated from an independent sample of 140 reading-disabled and 140 control nontwin children were used to reclassify the sample of twins, 75% of those with a positive history for reading problems were classified as being reading disabled and 95% of those with a negative history were classified as unaffected. Thus, results of this study establish the validity of school history information and suggest that such information may have considerable utility for ascertaining samples of reading-disabled children.     

Engagement during reading instruction for students who are deaf or hard of hearing in public schools

An observational study of reading instruction was conducted in general education, resource, and self-contained classrooms, grades 1-4, in public schools. Participants included students who were deaf or hard of hearing and their reading teachers. Results indicated that time engaged in reading and/or academically responding varied significantly by grade level enrolled, reading curriculum grade level, and instructional setting, but not level of hearing loss or presence or absence of concomitant conditions. Students working with reading curriculum one grade level below spent significantly less time in reading instruction and reading than students working on grade level or two levels below. Students in general education settings spent significantly more time in reading instruction and reading silently than students in self-contained settings. The probability that students would engage in reading was significantly increased by several teacher and ecological conditions more likely to be observed in general education settings.     

Dynamic testing, working memory, and reading comprehension growth in children with reading disabilities

This longitudinal study assessed (a) whether performance changes in working memory (WM) as a function of dynamic testing were related to growth in reading comprehension and (b) whether WM performance among subgroups of children with reading disabilities (RD; children with RD only, children with both reading and arithmetic deficits, and low verbal IQ readers) varied as a function of dynamic testing. A battery of memory and reading measures was administered to 78 children (11.6 years) across three testing waves spaced 1 year apart. WM tasks were presented under initial and dynamic testing conditions (referred to as gain and maintenance testing). The important results were that (a) WM performance as a function of maintenance testing was a significant moderator of growth in reading comprehension and (b) WM performance of children with RD was statistically comparable within subgroups of RD but inferior to that of skilled readers across all testing conditions. The results support the notion that children's WM performance under dynamic testing conditions was related to the rate of growth in reading comprehension but unrelated to subgroup differences in reading.     

A longitudinal study of mathematical competencies in children with specific mathematics difficulties versus children with comorbid mathematics and reading difficulties

Mathematical competencies of 180 children were examined at 4 points between 2nd and 3rd grades (age range between 7 and 9 years). Children were initially classified into one of 4 groups: math difficulties but normal reading (MD only), math and reading difficulties (MD-RD), reading difficulties but normal math (RD only), and normal achievement in math and reading (NA). The groups did not differ significantly in rate of development. However, at the end of 3rd grade the MD only group performed better than the MD-RD group in problem solving but not in calculation. The NA and RD only groups performed better than the MD-RD group in most areas. Deficiencies in fact mastery and calculation fluency, in particular, are defining features of MD, with or without RD.     

Differential genetic etiology of reading disability as a function of mathematics performance

In order to assess the etiology of reading disability as a function of mathematics performance, data from 168 monozygotic (MZ) and 127 same-sex dizygotic (DZ) twin pairs in which at least one member of each pair was reading-disabled were subjected to quantitative genetic analyses. MZ and DZ concordance rates for reading disability were computed for different levels of mathematics performance, and reading performance data were fitted to an extension of the basic multiple regression model for the analysis of selected twin data. Results of these analyses suggest that genetic factors may be especially salient as a cause of reading disability in children with borderline deficits in mathematics performance: thus, mathematics performance may be a valid dimension for diagnosing subtypes of reading disability.