Many states now mandate early screening for dyslexia, but vary in how they address these mandates. There is confusion about the nature of screening versus diagnostic assessments, risk versus diagnosis, concurrent versus predictive validity, and inattention to indices of classification accuracy as the basis for determining risk. To help define what…

There is increasing interest in the role of phonological awareness across languages. However, the role of phonological awareness in various languages may differ by features of the languages as well as by features of the speakers. The current meta-analysis catalogs these relations and examines factors that may have influenced how closely related…

Phonological awareness (PA), phonological memory (PM), and phonological access to lexical storage (also known as RAN), play important roles in acquiring literacy. We examined the convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of these phonological processing abilities (PPAs) in 147 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children whose native language was…

Two studies of Grade 1 reading interventions for English-language (EL) learners at risk for reading problems were conducted. Two samples of EL students were randomly assigned to a treatment or untreated comparison group on the basis of their language of instruction for core reading (i.e., Spanish or English). In all, 91 students completed the…

The effectiveness of an explicit, systematic reading intervention for first-grade students whose home language was Spanish and who were at risk for reading difficulties was examined. Participants were 69 students in 20 classrooms in 7 schools from 3 districts who initially did not pass the screening in Spanish and were randomly assigned within…