Washington: Although early reading tests are best suited to detect problems in the primary grades, recent studies point that these tests are not fool proof as they don't always identify students who go on to acquire reading difficulties later in life.

Interestingly, children who develop late-emerging reading disabilities fare well on conventional reading tests during the primary grades, but later performance in reading, spelling and literacy-related skill tests takes a nosedive.

A study conducted by researchers at the Haskins Laboratories and Bryn Mawr College compared the literacy, language and cognitive skills of 35 fourth and fifth graders with early-identified reading disabilities to scores of 31 fourth and fifth graders with late-identified RD.

The study published in the 'Journal of Educational Psychology', also compared to 95 normally achieving students and discovered late-identified reading deficits were different for subgroups of students. Some of the students were having problems with comprehending text, while others were having difficulty in identifying printed words, and others showed across-the-board deficiencies.

32 per cent of students identified with reading disabilities had poor reading comprehension but strong word recognition, a pattern that was rarely seen in children with early-emerging RD (six per cent).

Weaknesses in listening skills, vocabulary, and organisation may have contributed to declines in reading comprehension after third grade, when reading materials usually become more challenging to understand.

Other students with late-emerging RD fulfilled the typical "dyslexic" slot, as they had comprehension skills comparable to those of non-disabled readers, but were slow and inaccurate on word reading, spelling, phonological awareness, and naming tasks.

The different patterns emerging from the study suggest that schools make use of a variety of assessments to identify individual children's strengths and weaknesses. Children who are weak in reading comprehension tests may mainly have difficulty with word-level processing weaknesses and need to be distinguished from those with mere comprehension problems.

ANI