ONE OF the most compelling findings from recent reading research is that children who get off to a poor start in reading rarely catch up. As several studies have now documented, the poor first-grade reader al- most invariably continues to be a poor reader (Francis, Shaywitz, Stuebing, Shaywitz, & Fletcher, 1996; Torge- sen & Burgess, 1998). And the consequences of a slow start in reading become monumental as they accumu- late exponentially over time. As Stanovich (1986) pointed out in his well-known paper on the “Matthew effects” (the rich get richer and the poor get poorer) associated with failure to acquire early word reading skills, these consequences range from negative atti- tudes toward reading (Oka & Paris, 1986), to reduced opportunities for vocabulary growth (Nagy, Herman, & Anderson, 1985), to missed opportunities for develop- ment of reading comprehension strategies (Brown, Palinscar, & Purcell, 1986), to less actual practice in reading than other children receive (Arlington, 1984).

The best solution to the problem of reading failure is to allocate resources for early identification and prevention. It is a tragedy of the first order that while we know clearly the costs of waiting too long, few school districts have in place a mechanism to identify and help children before failure takes hold. Indeed, in the majority of cases, there is no systematic identifica- tion until third grade, by which time successful remedi- ation is more difficult and more costly.

School-based preventive efforts should be engi- neered to maintain growth in critical word reading

skills at roughly normal levels throughout the early el- ementary school period. Although adequate develop- ment of these skills in first grade does not guarantee that children will continue to maintain normal growth in second grade without extra help, to the extent that we allow children to fall seriously behind at any point during early elementary school, we are moving to a “re- medial” rather than a “preventive” model of interven- tion. Once children fall behind in the growth of critical word reading skills, it may require very intensive inter- ventions to bring them back up to adequate levels of reading accuracy (Allington & McGill-Franzen, 1994; Vaughn & Schumm, 1996), and reading fluency may be even more difficult to restore because of the large amounts of reading practice that is lost by children each month and year that they remain poor readers (Rashotte,Torgesen, & Wagner, 1997).

The purpose of this article is to provide practical ad- vice about methods to prevent reading failure that is grounded in the new knowledge about reading we have acquired over the past two decades. My primary focus will be on early identification of children at risk for problems in learning to read as well as methods for monitoring the growth of critical early reading skills. The goal is to describe procedures that will allow edu- cators to identify children who need extra help in reading before they experience serious failure and to monitor the early development of reading skill to iden- tify children who may require extra help as reading instruction proceeds through elementary school.

The advice provided in this article is based on the research my collea gues Richard Wa gner, Carol Rashotte, and I have been conducting on both predic- tion and prevention of reading disabilities (Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1994; 1997; Wagner, et al., 1994; 1997) as well as the work of many other researchers that was reviewed in an earlier issue of this magazine (Summer, 1995). It is guided by several important as- sumptions and facts about reading, reading growth, and reading failure that will be discussed first. Follow- ing this description of assumptions and a brief outline of some critical dimensions of preventive instruction, I will describe a number of specific measures and pro- cedures that should prove useful as educators seek

1 AMERICAN EDUCATOR/AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS

CATCH THEM BEFORE THEY FALL

Identification and Assessment To Prevent Reading Failure in Young Children

BY JOSEPH K.TORGESEN

Joseph K. Torgesen is currently a Distinguished Re- search Professor of psychology and education at Florida State University. For the last ten years, he has been part of the research effort sponsored by the Na- tional Institutes of Health to identify the nature, causes, and best approaches to instruction for chil- dren with moderate to severe reading problems. The research conducted at Florida State University that is cited in this article was supported by grants num- bered HD23340 and HD30988 from the National In- stitute of Child Health and Human Development, and by grants from the National Center for Learning Disabilities and the Donald D. Hammill Foundation.

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ways to focus more intensive in- struction on children whose needs are greatest.

Assumptions about reading, reading growth, and reading failure

Most of the points that will be discussed in this sec- tion are not, in fact, mere assumptions about reading, but, rather, are well-established facts. However, I use the word assumption here to convey the sense either that the ideas are self-evident or that they are now as- sumed to be true based on consistent research find- ings.The first of these “assumptions” is, in fact, a self-ev- ident value judgment.

Adequate reading comprehension is the most im- portant ultimate outcome of effective instruction in reading. The ultimate purpose of reading instruction is to help children acquire the skills that enable learning from, understanding, and enjoyment of written lan- guage.This “assumption” is not controversial. No matter what one’s personal preferences for instructional method, the end goal is to help children comprehend written material at a level that is consistent with their general intellectual abilities.

Two general types of skill and knowledge are re- quired for good reading comprehension. Consistent with Gough’s “simple view of reading” (1996), compre- hension of written material requires: 1) general lan- guage comprehension ability; and 2) ability to accu- rately and fluently identify the words in print. Knowl- edge and active application of specific reading strate- gies is also required to maximize reading comprehen- sion (Mastropieri & Scruggs, 1997) but most of the variability among children and adults in comprehen- sion of written material can be accounted for by mea- suring the two broad families of skills identified in Gough’s simple view (Hoover & Gough, 1990).That is, good general language comprehension and good word reading skills are the most critical skills required for ef- fective comprehension of written material.

Most children who become poor readers experi- ence early and continuing difficulties in learning how to accurately identify printed words. This diffi-

culty is expressed most di- rectly on two kinds of reading

tasks. First, children destined to be poor reader s at the end of elementar y

school almost invariably have difficulties under- standing and applying the alphabetic principle in deci- phering unfamiliar words.These children have unusual difficulties learning to use the regular patterns of cor- respondence between letters and sounds in words as an aid in identifying new words they encounter in text (Siegel, 1989). They have trouble “sounding out” un- known words. Second, poor readers at all grade levels are characterized by slower than normal development of a “sight vocabulary” of words they can read fluently and automatically. Ultimately, it is this difficulty in rapid word recognition that limits comprehension in older poor readers, for these skills allow children to focus on constructing the meaning of what they are reading rather than spending too many of their intellectual re- sources on trying to identify the words (Adams, 1990). The strongest current theories of reading growth link phonetic and “sight word” reading skills together by showing how good phonetic reading skills are neces- sary in the formation of accurate memory for the spelling patterns that are the basis of sight word recog- nition (Ehri, in press; Share & Stanovich, 1995).

The most common cause of difficulties acquiring early word reading skills is weakness in the ability to process the phonological features of language (Liber- man, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1989). This is perhaps the most important discovery about reading difficulties in the last twenty years. Weaknesses in the phonologi- cal area of language development can be measured by a variety of nonreading tasks, but the ones most com- monly used assess phonemic awareness, which can be defined simply as the ability to identify, think about, or manipulate the individual sounds in words. Much of our new confidence in being able to identify children at risk for reading failure before reading instruction be- gins depends on the use of tests of phonemic aware- ness, since this ability has been shown to be causally re- lated to the growth of early word reading skills (Lund- berg, Frost, & Peterson, 1988;Wagner, et al., 1997).

Discovery of the core phonological problems associ-

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ated with specific reading disability has had at least one unanticipated consequence. The ability to assess these core language problems directly has led to the discovery that the early word reading difficulties of children with relatively low general intelligence and verbal ability are associated with the same factors (weaknesses in phonological processing) that interfere with early reading growth in children who have gen- eral intelligence in the normal range (Fletcher, et al., 1994; Share & Stanovich, 1995; Stanovich & Siegel, 1994). So, weaknesses in phonemic awareness charac- terize children with reading problems across a broad span of general verbal ability. On the one hand, many children enter school with adequate general verbal ability and cognitive weaknesses limited to the phono- logical/language domain. Their primary problem in learning to read involves learning to translate between printed and oral language. On the other hand, another significant group of poor readers, composed largely of children from families of lower socio-economic or mi- nority status, enter school significantly delayed in a much broader range of prereading skills (Whitehurst & Lonigan, in press). Since these children are delayed not only in phonological but also in general oral language skills, they are deficient in both of the critical kinds of knowledge and skill required for good reading compre- hension. Even if these children can acquire adequate word reading skill, their ability to comprehend the meaning of what they read may be limited by their weak general verbal abilities.

Children with general oral language weaknesses re- quire extra instruction in a broader range of knowl- edge and skills than those who come to school im- paired only in phonological ability. What is well estab- lished at this point, though, is that both kinds of chil- dren will require special support in the growth of early word reading skills if they are to make adequate progress in learning to read.

Elements of an effective preventive program in reading

The most critical elements of an effective program for the prevention of reading disability at the elemen- tary school level are: (a) the right kind and quality of instruction delivered with the (b) right level of inten- sity and duration to (c) the right children at the (d) right time. I will briefly consider each of these ele- ments in turn.

The right kind and quality of instruction. It is be- yond the scope of this article to discuss instructional methods for children with phonological processing weaknesses in any depth at all. In broad stroke, they will benefit from the same approach to reading in- struction as children with normal abilities in this area—structured, systematic, and explicit—but for this at-risk group, such instruction is not just beneficial, it is critical. As experienced teachers understand (Gaskins, et al., 1996), we cannot assume that these children will acquire any necessary skill for reading words unless they are directly taught that skill or knowledge and re- ceive sufficient opportunities to practice it. Some of the word-level skills and knowledge these children will

require instruction on include: phonemic awareness, letter-sound correspondences, blending skills, a small number of pronunciation conventions (i.e., silent e rule), use of context to help specify a word once it is partially or completely phonemically decoded, strate- gies for multi-syllable words, and automatic recogni- tion of high-frequency “irregular” words. It goes almost without saying that this type of instruction should be embedded within as many opportunities for meaning- ful reading and writing as possible.

The lesson from recent large-scale prevention stud- ies (Brown & Felton, 1990; Foorman, et al., 1998;Torge- sen, et al., 1998;Vellutino, et al., 1997) is that it is possi- ble to maintain critical word reading skills of most chil- dren at risk for reading failure at roughly average levels if this type of instruction is provided beginning some- time during kindergarten or first grade. However, it is also true that in all studies conducted to date, substan- tial proportions of children with the most severe weaknesses remain significantly impaired in these criti- cal skills following intervention. For example, if we adopt the 30th percentile as a standard for adequate reading progress, then the proportion of the total pop- ulation remaining at risk in spite of the best interven- tions tested to date ranges from 5 percent to 7 percent (Torgesen, 1998).Although these results are clearly bet- ter than the 30 percent to 60 percent of children who frequently fall below these standards without special interventions, they nevertheless suggest that there is a core of disabled readers in the population for whom we have not yet solved the reading puzzle.

It is almost certain that some additional answers to this question will come as we direct our attention to the quality and intensity, as well as the content, of our instruction. For example, Juel (1996) has shown the importance of a particular kind of “scaffolded” interac- tion between teacher and child in increasing under- standing and application of phonemic reading skills, and these types of interactions are also prescribed in the teacher manuals of at least two widely used in- structional programs designed for children with read- ing disabilities (Lindamood & Lindamood, 1984; Wil- son, 1988). We turn now to a brief consideration of is- sues surrounding intensity of instruction.

The right level of intensity. Greater intensity and du- ration of instruction is required because the increased explicitness of instruction for children who are at risk for reading failure requires that more things be taught directly by the teacher. Intensity of instruction is in- creased primarily by reducing teacher/student ratios. Unless beginning reading instruction for children with phonological weaknesses is more intensive (or lasts significantly longer) than normal instruction, these children will necessarily lag significantly behind their peers in reading growth. An effective preventive pro- gram may involve several levels of instructional inten- sity ranging from small-group to one-on-one instruc- tion, depending upon the severity of the risk factors for each child.

The right children at the right time. These factors are considered together because they are both tied di- rectly to the availability of accurate identification pro- cedures at various age levels. That is, to be most effi-

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cient, a preventive program should be focused on the children who are most in need of special instruction. The efficiency of the entire process will be improved if procedures are available to accurately target the right children very early in the process of reading in- struction. Although timing issues with regard to preventive instruction have not been completely resolved by research (Torgesen, et al., 1998), we do know, for example, that instruction in phonological awareness during kinder- garten can have a positive effect on reading growth after formal reading instruction begins in the first grade (Lundberg, Frost, & Peterson, 1988). Thus, I have proceeded on the as- sumption that it will be useful to identify high-risk children at some time during the kindergarten year so that preventive work may begin as early as possible.

How accurate are currently available early identification procedures?

As stated earlier, the primary purpose of this article is to make some practical suggestions about procedures and tests that can be used to identify children for pre- ventive reading or prereading instruction. From the out- set, however, it is important to recognize that our ability to predict which children will have the most serious reading difficulties is still far from perfect. For example, in a recent comprehensive review of early identification research (1998), Scarborough pointed out that all stud- ies continue to report substantial levels of two kinds of prediction errors.

False positive errors are made when children who will eventually become good readers score below the cut-off score on the predictive instrument and are falsely identified as “at risk.” In general, the proportion of this type of error has ranged between 20 percent and 60 percent, with an average of around 45 percent. That is, almost half of the children identified during kindergarten as “at risk” turn out not to have serious reading problems by the end of first grade. False nega- tive errors occur when children who later exhibit reading problems are identified as not being at risk. Typical percentages of false negative errors range from 10 percent to 50 percent, with an average of around 22 percent. That is, on average, current procedures fail to identify about 22 percent of children who eventu- ally end up with serious reading difficulties.

In any given study, the relative proportion of false pos- itive and false negative errors is somewhat arbitrary, since it depends on the level of the cut-off score. For ex- ample, we reported a significant reduction in the per- centage of false negative errors within the same sample of children by doubling the number of children we identified as at risk (Torgesen, in press; Torgesen & Burgess, 1998). Our goal was to identify, during the first semester of kindergarten, the children most at risk to be in the bottom 10 percent in word reading ability by the beginning of second grade. When we selected the 10

percent of children who scored lowest on our predictive tests, our false negative rate was 42 percent (we missed almost half the chil- dren who became extremely poor readers). However, when we identified the 20 percent of children who scored lowest on our measures, the false nega- tive rate was reduced to 8 per- cent. As a practical matter, if schools desire to maximize their chances for early in-

tervention with the most im- paired children, they should pro-

vide this intervention to as many children as possi- ble.This is less of a waste of resources than it might

seem at first glance, because, although many of the falsely identified children receiving interven-

tion may not be among the most seriously disabled readers, most of them are likely to be below-average

readers (Torgesen & Burgess, 1998). Two other pieces of information are relevant to the

selection of procedures for early identification of chil- dren at risk for reading difficulties. First, prediction ac- curacy increases significantly the longer a child has been in school. Prediction of reading disabilities from tests given at the beginning of first grade is signifi- cantly more accurate than from tests administered dur- ing the first semester of kindergarten (Scarborough, 1998; Torgesen, Burgess, & Rashotte, 1996). Given the widely varying range of children’s preschool learning opportunities, many children may score low on early identification instruments in the first semester of kindergarten simply because they have not had the op- portunity to learn the skills. However, if prereading skills are actively taught in kindergarten, some of these differences may be reduced by the beginning of the second semester of school. Thus, I would recommend that the screening procedures described here not be administered until the beginning of the second semes- ter of kindergarten, at which time they will be much more efficient in identifying children who will require more intensive preventive instruction in phonemic awareness and other early reading skills.

Second, although batteries containing multiple tests generally provide better prediction than single instru- ments, the increase in efficiency of multi-test batteries is generally not large enough to warrant the extra time and resources required to administer them (Scarbor- ough, 1998). Thus, I recommend an identification pro- cedure involving administration of two tests: 1) a test of knowledge of letter names or sounds; and 2) a mea- sure of phonemic awareness. Measures of letter knowl- edge continue to be the best single predictor of read- ing difficulties, and measures of phonemic awareness contribute additional predictive accuracy. In our expe- rience, tests of letter name knowledge are most predic- tive for kindergarten children, and tests of letter-sound knowledge are most predictive for first graders. Since reading growth is influenced by noncognitive factors such as attention/motivation and home background (Torgesen, et al., 1998), as well as specific knowledge

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and skills, scores from these objective tests might profitably be supplemented with teacher ratings of behavior and attention to identify children most at risk for sub- sequent difficulties in learning to read.

How should phonemic awareness be assessed?

Since researchers first began to study phonological awareness in the early 1970s, more than twenty different tasks have been used to measure awareness of phonemes in words. These measures can be grouped into three broad categories: sound comparison, phoneme seg- mentation, and phoneme blending.

? Sound comparison tasks use a number of differ- ent formats that all require children to make compar- isons between the sounds in different words. For ex- ample, a child might be asked to indicate which word (of several) begins or ends with the same sound as a target word (i.e., “Which word begins with the same first sound as cat: boy, cake, or fan?”). Additionally, tasks that require children to generate words that have the same first or last sound as a target word would fall in this category. Sound comparison tasks are among the least difficult measures of phonemic awareness, and thus are particularly appropriate for kindergarten age children.

? Phoneme segmentation tasks involve counting, pronouncing, deleting, adding, or reversing the individ- ual phonemes in words. Common examples of this type of task require pronouncing the individual phonemes in words (“Say the sounds in cat one at a time.”), deleting sounds from words (“Say card without saying the /d/ sound.”), or counting sounds (“Put one marker on the line for each sound you hear in the word fast.”)

? Phoneme blending skill has only been measured by one kind of task. This is the sound-blending task in which the tester pronounces a series of phonemes in isolation and asks the child to blend them together to form a word (i.e., “What word do these sounds make, /f/ – /a/ – /t/?”). Easier variants of the sound-blending task can be produced by allowing the child to choose from two or three pictures the word that is repre- sented by a series of phonemes.

In general, these different kinds of phonemic aware- ness tasks all appear to be measuring essentially the same construct, or ability. Although some research (Yopp, 1988) has indicated that the tasks may involve different levels of intellectual complexity, and there may be some differences between segmentation and blending tasks at certain ages (Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1994), for the most part, they all seem to be measuring growth in the same general ability (Hoien, et al., 1995; Stanovich, Cunningham, & Cramer, 1984). Sound comparison measures are easiest and are sensi- tive to emergent levels of phonological awareness, while segmentation and blending measures are sensi- tive to differences among children during later stages of development involving refinements in explicit levels of awareness. Measures of sensitivity to rhyme (“Which

word rhymes with cat: leg or mat?”) are not included as measures of phonemic aware- ness because they appear to be measuring something a little different, and less pre- dictive of reading disabilities, from those measure that ask children to attend to individual phonemes. For the same reason, measures of syllable aware- ness are not included in this group.

Measures of phonemic awareness that are suited for early identification

purposes include the following three widely used tests:

The Phonological Awareness Test (Robertson & Salter, 1995). This test contains five different measures of phonemic awareness, plus a measure of sensitivity to rhyme. The five measures of phonemic awareness are segmentation of phonemes, phoneme isolation, phoneme deletion, phoneme substitution, and phoneme blending. The phoneme isolation test, which requires children to pronounce the first, last, or middle sounds in words, would appear to have the most ap- propriate level of difficulty for kindergarten screening (the test should be easy enough so that only the most delayed children will do poorly on it), and any of the others could be used for first- or second-grade assess- ments. The Phonological Awareness Test is nationally normed on children from age five through nine, and it can be ordered from LinguiSystems, 3100 4th Avenue, East Moline, IL 61244-0747. Phone: 800-776-4332. The cost of a test manual, test supplies, and fifteen test booklets is $69.

The Test of Phonological Awareness (Torgesen & Bryant, 1994).This test was designed as a group-admin- istered test of phonemic awareness for kindergarten and first-grade children. It was specifically constructed to be most sensitive to children with weaknesses in de- velopment in this area, which helps make it appropri- ate for identifying at-risk children. The kindergarten version of the test requires children to notice which words (represented by pictures) begin with the same first sound, while the first-grade version asks them to compare words on the basis of their last sounds. It can be easily administered to groups of five to ten children at a time. The Test of Phonological Awareness is na- tionally normed, and it can be ordered from PRO-ED Publishing Company, 8700 Shoal Creek Blvd., Austin, TX 78757-6897. Phone: (512) 451-3246. The cost of a test manual and a supply of fifty test forms (twenty-five kindergarten version, twenty-five elementary school version) is $124.

The Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation (Yopp, 1995) is a brief test of children’s ability to iso- late and pronounce the individual phonemes in words. This is a task that has been widely used in research on phoneme awareness over the past twenty years, and it is highly correlated with other measures of phoneme awareness. The test was designed for children in kindergarten, but it should also be appropriate for identifying children who are weak in phonemic aware- ness during first grade. The test has twenty-two items that are all of the same type and that ask the child to pronounce each of the phonemes in words that vary from two to three phonemes in length. The test does

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not have norms with it, but it is available free in vol- ume 49 (1995) of the widely read journal The Reading Teacher, pp. 20-29.

The measurement of letter knowledge

In all of our research, we have measured letter knowledge in two ways. We measure letter name knowledge by presenting each letter in simple upper- case type on a single card and asking for its name.The score on this test is simply the number of letters for which the child can give the appropriate name. We measure letter-sound knowledge by presenting all let- ters in lower-case type and asking for the “sound the letter makes in words.” If a consonant letter can com- monly represent two different sounds (i.e., c, g) we probe for the second sound, and we also ask for the long and short pronunciation of each vowel.The score is the total number of sounds the child can give. We have found that letter-name knowledge is a more sensi- tive predictor for kindergarten children, while letter- sound knowledge is a better predictor for children in first grade. Two tests that provide nationally standard- ized norms for performance on letter-name and letter- sound knowledge are:

The letter identification subtest of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test-Revised (Woodcock, 1987). This test does not measure simple letter-name knowledge in the way we assess it, because it presents letters in several different fonts, …

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