The “Test of early identification
of dyslexia” formed the main tool of measurement of the research that took place
among 584 infants who were going to the schools of the urban zones of four towns,
of the prefecture Ioannina, Greece. The test applied in two phases: in the studies
of the second semester of the second class of the infant school, and in the studies
of the second semester in second class of primary school.
The
main structural aims of the “Test of early identification of dyslexia” are:
- To highlight all those factors that, possibly,
are involved in the early development of the syndrome of specific developmental
dyslexia during the preschool age.
- To
prevent, in the first place, the labeling and the expression absolute and permanent
characteristics and, in the second place, to outline the areas where a dyslexic
child may face difficulties during the preschool age.
- To
provoke some questionings to the educator, because the use of the test rests on
the following:
- To be used by the nursery nurses or the teachers in order
to take a specific position according to the difficulties that they notice in
a student’s learning behaviour.
- To highlight the significance of writing
as the main form of communication and of the achievement of new knowledge.
- To suggest the opportunity of timely and reliable diagnosis, of proper retraining
and psycho sentimental support of dyslexic children. It, also, provides the necessity
of training specialist educators regarding the syndrome of specific developmental
dyslexia during the preschool age.
- To propose the necessity of the application
of individual teaching forms and specific teaching programs in the preschool age.
- Moreover, in wider
limits, the main aim of the test is to be used:
- As a tool by specialists
students, psychologists, specialist educationalists, doctors or researchers for
measuring and diagnosis in the context of intervention and support for children
with the syndrome of specific developmental dyslexia.
- In a clinical level
of research and study, by way of detection of possibly causal factors that can
be related with the early appearance of the syndrome.
Items
and instruction for completing the test
During the planning and organization
of the test, our main aim was not the presentation of items that would have the
ability to count indications of dyslexia, but mainly, to measure indications that
have been noticed in direct relationship with factors such as: the Greek language
and the Greek alphabet, the official analytical program and the Greek educational
system, in general.
The
items that have finally been included in the test, have been chosen from a large
number of items, have been evaluated and have been elaborated through a procedure
of pilotal examination of their context and form.
Finally,
eight items have been chosen that consisted, in totoal, of seventy-four exercises.
The main characteristics of these items can be defined as the following:
- They concern the main
factors that are connected with dyslexia
- They
can show the whole character of one varying spectrum of symptoms that show the
image of dyslexia’s syndrome.
- They
have between them a synthetical character, because they coexist as specific symptoms
in the infant’s behavior.
- They
have the ability of hierarchy and of categorization regarding the early appearance
of the dyslexic symptoms (an infant with early indication of the dyslexic behavior
has a low performance in the item of phonological concept, in higher rate from
the item of the classification’s skill).
The
way that these items are being classified and described had been done in that
manner, so that the test to de divided into the following two units:
a)
Description of a sublect's general intellectual development;
b) Description
of specific skills of development: psycho mobility (B2), visual perception (B3,
B4, B8), laterality (B5a-b), pre-writing ability (B6) and phonological awareness
(B7).
Finally,
we have to mention the fact that each item includes a number of exercises that
the person who is under examination has to complete. The total progress in those
exercises is taken as the final grade of each item.
The
items that have been judged as the most powerful in order to be counted as early
indication of the behavior of dyslexia are the following:
The
item of “child’s drawing” (B2): through this item, we had the ability to diagnose
the child’s ability to understand concepts like those of the body shape, direction,
placing objects into space and of some logic-mathematical concepts (up-down, right-left,
in front-back).
(It
was not possible to print Chart B2 for technical reasons.)
The
item of “writing a name” (B6): with this specific item we can examine:
I.
The child’s pre-writing ability.
II. The understanding of the procedure of
codification of graphemes in conscious semantically and grammatical verbal totals
(words like his/her name).
III. The child’s ability to control the medium
by which s/he writes and at the same time, the ability to symbolize the audio-visual
stimulus through some procedures of choice and control, in order for the child
to form a conceptually determined way of expression and communication.
(It was not possible to print Chart B6 for technical reasons.)
The
item of “distinction of sounds” (B7): this item has been considered as characteristic
so as to study the possibility of the child achieving the phonological procedure
(Grith, U., 1985, Chiappe, P. and Siegel, L., 1999), as well the readiness of
transition from the logographical to the alphabetical level of conquering the
language.
(It
was not possible to print Chart B7 for technical reasons.)
Children who had a low performance in the previous three items had analogous performance
on the rest of the items, creating a strong relationship of interdependence and
interaction among the items. However, we have to mention that the infants who
had answered in the test, in the infant school, and did not succeed in the above
three items, did not have low performance in the test, in the primary school,
neither did they have (according to the information given by the educationalists
from the questionnaire) special difficulties in learning how to write.
The
test material
The
“Test of early identification of dyslexia” includes two small booklets:
- The first:
a)
Describes the items that are applied to the each step of the research and it also
describes the reporting target of each of them.
b) Describes the way that
each item is carried out, and
c) The way of valuation and of marking the
answers of the student that is under examination in each of the items.
- The second is being used
by the examiner during the practice of the test so that each of the items could
be completed accurately and without mistakes or omissions, not only by the student
but also by the examiner regarding the correct expression of the instructions
and of the desired information.
The
rest of the test material consists of cards that are given in the right order
to the subject to carry out a specific activity. They also consist of audio-visual
materials, which are necessary for the accomplishment particular items, like that
of the laterality (a radio, a scissor, a string, a little ball, etc).
Finally,
the test has a leaflet in which the examiner writes down the answers of the child
by item, by the total grade and with possible personal remarks.
Checking
the reliability and validity of the test
The
procedure that we followed in order to check the reliability of the test was the
checking of the internal result of the test. To do that we used, the indexes of
Kuder -Richardson and Alpha of Cronbach.
It
is characteristic that the figure of the reliability indexes in the present test
tends to strengthen from the choice of the method of the logistic regression,
according to which the best model of the valuation of the test’s items, included
the items B2, B6 and B7 with order of the indication of high reliability respectively
(percentage of correct evaluation 96, 80%).
More
specifically, for items of “child’s drawing” (B2) and of the “distinction of sounds”
(B7) we applied the reliability index of Kuder –Richardson, because the answers
took the price of 0 -1.
On
the other hand, in the case of “writing the name” (B6) we applied the index of
Alpha coefficient because the answers’ price was 0-1-2.
The
rates that took the indexes by item, were the followings: for the item “child’s
drawing” (B2): K-R=0, 76, for the item “distinction of sounds” (B7): K-R=0, 69
and for the item “writing the name” (B6): A=0, 81.
In order to check the procedure of validity of the test, we follow all the three
procedures:
I. Content’s validity: an additional procedure for controlling
the content’s validity is the calculation of a discrimination index of the test’s
questions. According to the analysis, the factors of the discrimination index
in the item of “child’s drawing” is 0, 57, in the “writing the name” is 0, 63
and in the “distinction of sounds” is 0, 44. It is easily understood that the
above-mentioned factors declare the question’s quality and the reliability of
measurement of the cognitive areas that they study, according to dyslexia.
II. The validity of criterion: in order to judge this form of validity
we used two types of control:
a) The checking of the validity of predictive,
applying a paired sample test. From this test we evaluated the children’s progress
in each item in the stage of infant school and in the stage of primary school
and we examined the possibilities of rejection or confirmation of our nulls case
and,
b) The checking of the validity concurrent giving two types of questionnaires
(to the parents and to the teachers of the under examination students) during
the two stages (infant school, primary school) of the test’s application.
III. The structural validity: this particular form of validity has been
checked through the study not only of the reliability indexes of internal consequence
of the items (indexes of Kuder Richardson and Alpha coefficient), but also from
the study of the items’ discrimination index.
Findings
The findings
from the test’s application and the analysis of the data could be the following:
The analysis
of test data showed that the choice of items that have been included in it, in
order to study the relationship of certain factors with the early development
of dyslexia, was, on the one hand, especially satisfactory and on the other hand,
it converges with the point of view of contemporary specialists (Brady, S., 1986,
Frith, U., 1986, Catts, H., 1989, Lecocq, P., 1991), who accept the phonological
procedure and the psycho mobility (body shape, spatiotemporality) as the main
factors that can be related to the early diagnosis of dyslexia during the pre
school age.
The
specific tool of measurement was judged with satisfactory enough indexes of reliability
and validity, judgment that finds satisfactory its use in the effort of the early
diagnosis of dyslexia. At the same time, it makes necessary its use only if the
scientific parameters are rigorous without generalizations and misguided interpretation
of its results.
We
can consider as extremely important the observation that this particular test
has as a main aim the measurement and the evaluation of the behavior of early
symptoms of dyslexia, only, and not the diagnosis or the detection of generally
learning difficulties or other disorders. Wider study of the research’s data has
as a result the fact, that we can not attempt with it the distinction and categorization
of the forms and of the kind of dyslexia, neither the imposition of infant’s characterization
as successful or as unsuccessful. But we attempt the connection of lower performances
with a combination of items with the possibility of appearance of dyslexic symptoms.
In the same way,
it is commonly understood that the present test does not constitute a part of
a total measurement that attempt to study the phenomenon of dyslexia in a rating
scale of chronological age, but it constitutes an isolated tool of measurement
that has as a main aim the early identification of dyslexia for only the preschool
age.
Finally,
we consider that both the data’s analysis and its explanatory approach should
be attempted only by specialists, under strictly specified condition of doing
the measurement, having as a criterion of account only the generally infant’s
learning behavior.
To
sum up, we would like to redefine the aim of our whole effort: that is to say
the construction of a valid and reliable tool of measurement, which, via an optical
multidisciplinary approach of dyslexia, will have the possibility of recording
and evaluating the forms of dyslexia at an early stage: in which the person has
not come into an organized system of teaching and learning of language and, especially
writing. The tool of measurement itself, and the intervention methods could be
useful not only in the diagnosis stage but also in the reliable diagnosis and
confrontation of the syndrome of specific developmental dyslexia.
May
2002
Victoria
Zakopoulou, Lambros Stavrou.
UNIVERSITY
OF IOANNINA SCHOOL OF EDUCATION LABORATORY OF SPECIAL AND CURATIVE EDUCATION (LABESPEC)
Director: Pr. Dr. Lambros STAVROU 45110 Ioannina (GREECE) Tel. +30-651-98769 +30-651-98758
+30-94252055 (mobile) Fax. +30-651-98769 E-mail: l.stavrou@cc.uoi.gr
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