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Identification and Assessment To Prevent Reading Failure in Young Children Torgesen, J. K. ( Spring,1998). American Educator, 32-39. Abstracted by Steve Colson Torgesen begins his article by challenging educators with a sober fact from recent research-children who get off to a poor start in reading rarely catch up. This is a strong argument for helping reduce reading failure by allocating resources for early identification and prevention. He discusses assumptions about reading, reading growth, and reading failure then lists the elements of an effective reading prevention program. The accuracy of early identification procedures is discussed with several suggestions for published measures. He concludes with suggestions for monitoring growth in early reading skills, using commonly used diagnostic measures of word reading ability. Research tells us a great deal about early reading and early reading failure. Adequate reading comprehension is the most important ultimate outcome of effective instruction in reading. Good reading comprehension skills require general language comprehension ability as well as the ability to accurately and fluently identify the words in print. Most children who become poor readers experience early and continuing difficulties in learning how to accurately identify printed words. Most early reading problems include the inability to process the phonological features of language. There are critical elements of an effective program for the prevention of reading disability in the early grades. It is crucial that poor readers be taught with a well-structured, systematic, and explicit approach to reading. Greater intensity and duration of instruction is required for poor readers which is typically accomplished by reducing teacher/student ratios. The last, but perhaps most critical element, concerns identifying the children who are most in need of this type of remedial instruction. Torgesen suggest administering two types of tests at the beginning for the second semester of kindergarten. Both a test of knowledge of letter names or sounds and a measure of phonemic awareness, including the broad categories of sound comparison, phoneme segmentation, and phoneme blending, are useful in predicting reading failure. He discusses widely used tests for both sets of skills. After children are initially chosen for remedial instruction, monitoring growth of reading skills is essential. Tests must be chosen or developed that quantify the degree of skill a child possesses in critical word identification processes. Torgesen describes tests that measure sight word reading ability, phonetic reading ability, and word reading fluency. When these types of assessments are used, along with observing how the child integrates all sources of information about words in text, a complete picture of overall reading development emerges to assist in instructional planning and monitoring. |
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