ASSESSING READING DIFFICULTIES - THE VALIDITY AND UTILITY OF CURRENT MEASURES OF READING SKILL

Background. Accurate assessment of reading difficulties is clearly imp ortant if appropriate support and remediation is to be provided. Many different reading tests are routinely used yet it is not clear to what extent different tests tap the same underlying skills. Aims. The natu re of the relationships between different tests of reading accuracy, r eading comprehension and linguistic comprehension is investigated in t his paper. Samples. Methods and Results, In study 1, 184 7-10 year old children completed a listening comprehension test, three tests of rea ding accuracy (reading of nonwords, single words and text) and two tes ts of reading comprehension (text comprehension and sentence completio n). While sentence completion was well accounted for by individual dif ferences in word recognition, text comprehension was more heavily depe ndent on listening comprehension. Study 2 compared the performance of children with poor comprehension skills with controls matched for age, nonverbal ability and decoding skill. The poor comprehenders had grea test difficulty with those tests most heavily dependent on linguistic comprehension and least difficulty on purer measures of decoding. Conc lusions. These findings show that different reading tests measure diff erent aspects of the reading process and that caution should be exerci sed when selecting tests for the assessment of reading difficulties.