Early Identification and Characterization

A key theoretical and clinical issue in the OR project was the early identification of at-risk young children for developing later difficulties. This issue is critical for early prevention practices. The OR project dealt with examining and validating the reliability of tools for screening and detecting struggling readers in Grade 2 as well as their ability to characterize struggling readers over time. The findings of the study point to two screening tools that meet the criteria of excellent screening measures: reading fluency and comprehension fluency. These screening tools were found to be effective and to have good validity and reliability, as well as being cheap and fast to deliver. The study found that these screening tools allow for identifying struggling readers and predicting gaps between struggling readers and typically developing readers in various literacy, cognitive, and emotional abilities. Additionally, these screening tools enable predicting gaps in reading comprehension between groups of readers characterized on the basis of these screening measures.

Thus, for a quick screener, these two measurements are highly recommended; in fact, today they are used throughout Israel as the primary screening tool by the ministry of education.

For further reading, link to paper by Dotan, Shaul, Katzir and Lipka: Screening, identifying, and characterizing struggling readers in second grade: The promise of fluency measures