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MONDAY, June 23, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- Parents and educators may assume that if children are reading well in the first and second grades, they will continue to read well in later grades.
That's not always the case, reports a new study: Some youngsters develop "late-emerging" reading disabilities.
The problem, says study author Hollis Scarborough, is that these children aren't being identified by schools as having difficulties because tests designed to pick up these problems are generally administered in earlier grades.
"We found that some kids who are successful readers can show rather abrupt changes or declines starting in fourth or fifth grades," says Scarborough, a senior research scientist at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Conn. Haskins is a nonprofit research center for the study of speech, language and reading. The study appears in the June issue of the Journal of Educational Psychology.
Scarborough and her colleagues recruited 161 children for this study. The group consisted of 74 fourth-graders and 87 fifth-graders, and was almost equally split between male and female. Ninety-five percent of the kids were white. The children were from 12 different schools in the greater Philadelphia area -- six were in affluent communities and six were in more socioeconomically diverse areas.
The researchers examined the children's reading, language and cognitive skills.
They found 95 students had age-appropriate reading skills, 35 who were identified with reading problems before third grade, and 31 with late-emerging reading difficulty. Only nine of the youngsters with a late-emerging reading disability had been identified by their school.
"Typically, kids with reading disabilities show up early," explains Scarborough. "One possibility why the schools aren't identifying these kids is that no one expects this to happen. It's likely that in a year or two a lot of these reading disabilities will be picked up."
Not all of the kids had the same difficulties with reading, reports the study.
"Some show declines in comprehension, and some kids have problems with recognizing printed words," Scarborough says.
Thirty-two percent of those in the late-emerging reading disability group had strong word recognition but difficulty with reading comprehension, while 35 percent had trouble with words, phonetics and spelling, but had no trouble with overall comprehension. The remainder of the group -- 33 percent -- had trouble in both word recognition and comprehension.
"The number one thing schools can do is to be alert that this does happen," Scarborough says. To catch these problems, however, requires individual assessment, which is too expensive and unnecessary to do for all children. However, Scarborough says if your child seems to be struggling, you should seek an individual assessment. She cautions that schools may not initially be receptive to the idea.
"It's a child's right to learn how to read," says Susan J. Schwartz, clinical coordinator at the Institute for Learning and Academic Achievement at the New York University Child Study Center, who says she wasn't surprised by the study's findings.
She says parents need to make sure their children are getting sufficient and appropriate help. For a first-grader, whose job in school is almost exclusively learning to read, Schwarz says extra help once a week is not enough. Likewise, once a week is not enough for a fourth-grader who is having reading difficulties because his job is now to read to learn, she says.
If your child isn't getting the help she needs, Schwarz says you can petition the school district's committee on special education to get extra assistance.
More information
Here are some tips from the American Academy of Pediatrics on helping your child learn to read. To learn more about getting special help for your child, read this article from the Nemours Foundation.
