Early Identification of Children at Risk for Reading Disabilities

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Abstract
A sample of 221 children (102 females, 119 males) were tested in kindergarten with a battery of tests that included measures of phonological awareness, phonological coding in lexical access, and coding in working memory. Reading skill was measured in third grade with a group-administered achievement test (vocabulary and comprehension), and children were classified as severely disabled, poor, average, or superior readers. Of the 19 possible kindergarten predictors, only rapid naming of letters, general ability, and discrimination of beginning sounds within words significantly contributed to the prediction of reading outcome. With general ability removed from the analysis, rapid letter naming, beginning sound discrimination, and auditory conceptualization predicted reading outcome. These three measures were very accurate in predicting reading outcome for the extremely poor and superior readers. The false negative rate was low but the false positive rate was quite high. These results suggest that the diagnosis of children as at risk for reading difficulties or as reading disabled in kindergarten is a complex process that must involve the evaluation of a broad range of skills, including, but not limited to, phonological processing.