Teachers often use the wrong tests to identify children with reading problems, placing students in inappropriate classes and delaying treatment for their true difficulties, a new study shows.
Researchers discovered that oral reading tests, a mainstay of education, fail to distinguish between children who can?t understand words on a page and those who know the words but struggle with saying them aloud.
One child studied in the experiment stumbled over the word “cocoon,” but showed he knew what it was, saying, “You know, it is that brown thing hanging in the tree.”
“Students fail because they have trouble speaking aloud and get placed in remedial reading courses, where they are taught what they already know,” said Rochelle Newman, co-author of the study and a University of Maryland hearing and speech sciences professor.
“It?s very frustrating for children because they become bored. It?s also a waste of schools? resources.”
The study, published in this month?s issue of Reading Psychology, recommends that teachers and language pathologists use silent reading tests instead of oral ones.
“If we don?t make that shift, we are going to continue misdiagnosing students, and then you start a spiral of failure,” said Diane German, principal researcher and special education professor at National-Louis University in Chicago.
All 25 of the students in the experiment diagnosed with word-finding difficulties had been incorrectly placed in remedial reading classes despite their ability to read silently.
About one in five children nationwide have some kind of learning difficulty, and nearly half of them wrestle with word finding.
Researchers compared first-graders? reading skills with those of second- and third-graders identified as having reading problems in an attempt to show that if the older children couldn?t read, they would score as low as the rookie first-grade readers.
Instead, the older children scored 98 percent in the silent test compared with 58 percent for the first-graders, proving that the older children knew the words but couldn?t say them aloud.
