Clara Regina Brandão de Ávila

Effectiveness of Music Education for the Improvement of Reading Skills and Academic Achievement in Young Poor Readers: A Pragmatic Cluster-Randomized, Controlled Clinical Trial

Introduction Difficulties in word-level reading skills are prevalent in Brazilian schools and may deter children from gaining the knowledge obtained through reading and academic achievement. Music education has emerged as a potential method to improve reading skills because due to a common neurobiological substratum. Objective To evaluate the effectiveness of music education for the improvement of reading skills and academic achievement among children (eight to 10 years of age) with reading difficulties. Method 235 children with reading difficulties in 10 schools participated in a five-month, randomized clinical trial in cluster (RCT) in an impoverished zone within the city of São Paulo to test the effects of music education intervention while assessing reading skills and academic achievement during the school year. Five schools were chosen randomly to incorporate music classes (n = 114), and five served as controls (n = 121). Two different methods of analysis were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention: The standard method was intention-to-treat (ITT), and the other was the Complier Average Causal Effect (CACE) estimation method, which took compliance status into account. Results The ITT analyses were not very promising; only one marginal effect existed for the rate of correct real words read per minute. Indeed, considering ITT, improvements were observed in the secondary outcomes (slope of Portuguese = 0.21 [p<0.001] and slope of math = 0.25 [p<0.001]). As for CACE estimation (i.e., complier children versus non-complier children), more promising effects were observed in terms of the rate of correct words read per minute [β = 13.98, p<0.001] and phonological awareness [β = 19.72, p<0.001] as well as secondary outcomes (academic achievement in Portuguese [β = 0.77, p<0.0001] and math [β = 0.49, p<0.001] throughout the school year). Conclusion The results may be seen as promising, but they are not, in themselves, enough to make music lessons as public policy.

Competência ortográfica e metafonológica: influências e correlações na leitura e escrita de escolares da 4ª série

PURPOSE: To study the performance of 4th grade students on reading, writing and phonological awareness tasks. METHODS: Thirty-two 4th grade children (50% of each gender), with ages between nine and 11 years, were evaluated according to the following procedure: anamnesis, reading and writing task (54 linguistic tokens), and phonological awareness task. The students were divided into two research groups and two comparison groups: GPI: carried out the writing task first, and then the reading task; GPII: completed the reading, followed by the writing task; GCI: completed only the writing items; GCII: completed only the reading items. RESULTS: In the writing task, GPII showed the highest rates of correct answers, and GPI, GPII and GCI had better performances in writing high frequency words, followed by pseudowords and low frequency words. The reading evaluation showed that the performances of GPI, GPII and GCII were similar, and GPI and GPII had more correct answers for pseudowords, followed by high frequency words. The correlation between phonological awareness and writing was moderate, while correlations between phonological awareness and reading, and writing and reading were very weak. CONCLUSION: Phonological awareness was moderately correlated to the performance on the writing task, and weakly correlated to the performance on the reading task. The psycholinguistic feature low familiarity determined the highest error averages, both in reading and writing tasks.

Níveis de compreensão de leitura em escolares

BACKGROUND: important reading performance measurements are related to how and to what extent a child understands a written text. AIM: to study the performance of primary school (Ensino Fundamental) students in reading comprehension tasks according to the variables grade and type of school. METHOD: 160 students from the 3rd to the 6th grades were screened and later evaluated based on the retelling and question answering about a given text. RESULTS: students of the 5th and 6th grades of private schools presented a better performance on issues related to implicit information when compared to students of public schools. The overall analysis of the educational level revealed, through the retelling task, a better performance of the 6th grade students in terms of the number of present macro propositions and a low performance of the 5th grade students in terms of the achieved comprehension level, in both types of school. When answering text-derived questions, the 4th, 5th and 6th grade students performed better than the 3rd grade students regarding explicit questions. When considering implicit questions, the 4th grade students performed better than all the other grades, in both types of school. These results gave evidence to the influence of the different texts used in each grade. CONCLUSION: the 5th and 6th grades from private schools were the only grades that performed better when compared to public schools in general, regarding answering implicit knowledge questions. All students achieved some level of reading comprehension.

Uso e conhecimento ortográfico no transtorno específico da leitura

PURPOSE: To investigate how children with dyslexia use the phonographemic correspondence rule in their writing regardless of context and how they identify and analyze their writing mistakes according to the variables: frequency of occurrence of the linguistic item and school grade. METHODS: The writing errors observed on a task of dictation of high- and low-frequency words and pseudowords were analyzes and compared. Fifty-six students from 1st to 4th grades of private elementary schools were evaluated: 28 with dyslexia (research group), and 28 without writing complaints or deficits (comparison group), paired by age, gender and grade. The reasons for right and wrong answers were taped and compared. RESULTS: The statistic analysis showed that students with dyslexia performed worse than the comparison group. Moreover, there was a decrease in the number of errors with the progression of schooling, especially in high frequency words. Students with dyslexia showed more difficulty to analyze the linguistic items and recognize their correct writing. CONCLUSION: Children with dyslexia had more difficulties in writing and analyzing linguistic items of transparent orthography. The effect of lexical frequency facilitated error identification. The occurrence of errors decreased with schooling progression and varied according to linguistic item.

Escala de leitura: proposta de avaliação das competências leitoras

OBJETIVO: Apresentar uma escala de testes destinada a avaliar as competencias de leitura e investigar sua confiabilidade na mensuracao do desempenho de criancas de oito anos a 11 anos e 11 meses. METODOS: Foi elaborado um instrumento, contendo 12 itens de teste, organizados em quatro campos de competencias: Conhecimento de Letras e Relacao Fono-grafemica, Decodificacao de Itens Isolados, Fluencia de Leitura de Textos, Compreensao de Leitura. Para o estudo da confiabilidade foram selecionadas 100 criancas (64 meninas) de escolas da rede publica com idade de oito anos a 11 anos e 11 meses. Vinte criancas (12 meninas) participaram do estudo de aplicabilidade que resultou na versao de estudo da Escala de Leitura, que foi utilizada na avaliacao das demais 80 criancas (52 meninas). As respostas obtidas foram analisadas e computadas para a atribuicao de escores de item, que permitiram o calculo dos escores por campo de competencia e do escore bruto da escala. Estes dados foram submetidos a analise estatistica para a obtencao do coeficiente alpha de Cronbach, empregado no estudo da confiabilidade do instrumento. Complementarmente, procedeu-se ao estudo das correlacoes entre os itens (coeficiente de correlacao de Pearson). Adotou-se nivel de significância de 0,05. RESULTADOS: Na analise da consistencia interna obteve-se α=0,866 para a Escala de Leitura. Correlacoes entre os itens foram observadas em algumas escalas, variando de fracas a fortes e corroboraram os valores do coeficiente alpha. CONCLUSAO: A Escala de Leitura mostrou-se confiavel para mensurar o desempenho das criancas da amostra.

Parâmetros de fluência e tipos de erros na leitura de escolares com indicação de dificuldades para ler e escrever

OBJETIVO: Caracterizar o desempenho de escolares com indicacao de dificuldades de leitura e escrita, segundo o ano escolar, categorias de erros, parâmetros de fluencia leitora e as correlacoes entre essas variaveis. METODOS: Foram avaliadas 60 criancas (48% meninas), do 3o ao 5o ano do Ensino Fundamental da rede publica. Trinta (dez de cada ano) que apresentavam indicios de dificuldades relacionadas ao aprendizado ou desempenho de leitura e escrita, compuseram o Grupo Pesquisa. Trinta, pareadas por idade e ano escolar, indicadas pelos professores como boas leitoras, compuseram o Grupo Controle. Todas leram, oralmente, duas listas de itens isolados (38 palavras e 29 pseudopalavras) e um texto. As leituras foram gravadas, transcritas e os parâmetros e erros, analisados. RESULTADOS: Foram encontradas diferencas entre os grupos, com pior desempenho do Grupo Pesquisa em todas as variaveis estudadas. Os tipos de erros de leitura: desrespeito a regra de correspondencia independente do contexto, omissoes e adicoes, desrespeito a acentuacao, erros complexos e recusas foram mais frequentes nesse grupo. As taxas e valores de fluencia mostraram-se mais baixos nos escolares com queixas em relacao aos bons leitores. Correlacoes negativas foram identificadas entre as variaveis de fluencia de leitura e os diferentes erros, com diferentes valores para cada grupo e mostraram nessa amostra de escolares, que o numero total de erros diminuiu com a progressao da escolaridade. CONCLUSAO: Os escolares com indicacao de dificuldades de leitura e de escrita apresentaram piores desempenhos de fluencia na leitura, e maior numero de erros em todos os anos escolares estudados. As correlacoes encontradas evidenciaram a influencia do tipo de erro sobre a fluencia da leitura, segundo diferentes padroes para cada grupo.

Tipologia de erros de leitura de escolares brasileiros considerados bons leitores

TEMA: avaliacao da leitura oral. OBJETIVO: caracterizar, segundo as variaveis rede de ensino e escolaridade, os tipos de erro na leitura de palavras isoladas, apresentados por escolares tipicos do ensino fundamental, considerados competentes por seus professores. METODO: participaram da pesquisa 151 escolares com idade entre oito e doze anos, matriculados do quarto ao setimo ano do ensino fundamental das redes publica e particular. Os escolares leram uma lista com 38 palavras. As leituras orais foram transcritas e os erros analisados, segundo a frequencia de erros cometidos calculada com base na possibilidade de erros oferecida pela lista apresentada. RESULTADOS: os resultados encontrados evidenciaram a presenca de erros quando analisadas as leituras dos escolares tipicos de ambas as redes de ensino e de todas as series estudadas. Houve reducao progressiva e estatisticamente significante dos erros de decodificacao ortografica em funcao da progressao da escolaridade (p < 0,0001). Considerando a rede de ensino, os escolares da rede particular apresentaram menor numero de erros que os de escola publica quando comparado o desempenho na decodificacao ortografica global na prova de leitura de palavras (p < 0,0001). CONCLUSAO: os resultados demonstraram que os erros de leitura fazem parte do aprendizado das regras de decodificacao ortografica e sao superados, progressivamente, com o aumento da escolaridade. O dominio da decodificacao da ortografia independente do contexto ocorreu mais precocemente que o da dependente do contexto grafemico.

Competência lexical e metafonológica em pré-escolares com transtorno fonológico

BACKGROUND lexical and metaphonological abilities of phonologically disordered preschoolers. AIM to investigate the influence of Phonological Disorder on the lexical and metaphonological abilities of a group of preschoolers and the correlation between them. METHOD participants were 56 preschoolers - 32 boys and 24 girls - with ages between 4 years and 6 months and 6 years and 11 months, divided into two different groups: the Research Group, composed of 28 preschoolers with Phonological Disorder, and the Control Group, composed of 28 preschoolers with normal speech and no oral speech-related complaints, paired to the research group by gender and age. All of the participants were initially assessed by the ABFW Test - Phonology. After that, they were assessed on their lexical and metaphonological abilities by the ABFW Test - Vocabulary and phonological awareness test: sequential assessment instrument, CONFIAS - identification tasks and, rhyme and alliteration production, respectively. RESULTS regarding lexical ability, the preschoolers from both groups presented similar behavior. The disordered preschoolers presented the worst performance on the overall analysis of the metaphonological ability. Age had an influence on the performance of lexical ability for both groups and the metaphonological abilities only for the Control Group. Correlations were identified, mostly positive, good to moderate between lexical and metaphonological abilities. CONCLUSION the influence of Phonological Disorder may only be observed on the metaphonological performance. Phonological Disorder did not interfere with the development of the lexical ability of this group of preschoolers. Positive correlations were identified between both abilities in the studied age group.

EACOL (Scale of Evaluation of Reading Competence by the Teacher): evidence of concurrent and discriminant validity

Aim The study aimed to provide information about the concurrent and discriminant validation of the Scale of Evaluation of Reading Competence by the Teacher (EACOL), which is composed of 27 dichotomous items concerning reading aloud (17 items) and reading silently (10 items). Samples Three samples were used in this validation study. The first was composed of 335 students with an average age of 9.75 years (SD = 1.2) from Belo Horizonte (Minas Gerais State), Brazil, where the full spectrum of reading ability was assessed. The second two samples were from São Paulo city (São Paulo State), Brazil, where only children with reading difficulties were recruited. The first São Paulo sample was labeled “SP-screening” and had n = 617, with a mean age of 9.8 years (SD = 1.0), and the other sample was labeled “SP-trial” and had n = 235, with a mean age of 9.15 years (SD = 0.05). Methods Results were obtained from a latent class analysis LCA, in which two latent groups were obtained as solutions, and were correlated with direct reading measures. Also, students’ scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale and on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire tested the discriminant validation. Results Latent groups of readers underlying the EACOL predicted all direct reading measures, while the same latent groups showed no association with behavior and intelligence assessments, giving concurrent and discriminant validity to EACOL, respectively. Conclusion EACOL is a reliable screening tool which can be used by a wide range of professionals for assessing reading skills.

Tipo de estímulo e memória de trabalho fonológica

PURPOSE: to investigate the influence of the type of linguistic stimulus presentation on phonological memory. METHODS: 27 2nd grade students of a public elementary school with ages ranging between 7 and 8-years old were assessed (59.25% girls). The students had no history or complaints of neurological, cognitive or auditory deficits. The children passed the Auditory Processing Simplified Assessment and were submitted to a syllable or pseudo-word repetition task. The stimuli were recorded and presented as: I) fluent - (pseudo-words presented within a 10-second interval) - presented to 13 students, and II) syllabic - 01-second intervals between syllables and 10-second intervals between each series - presented to 14 students. The repetitions were transcribed; the errors were marked, analyzed and compared according to gender and stimuli presentation pattern. RESULTS: according to the analysis, a one syllable difference was observed, with a better performance when the second list was presented and starting with the 5 syllable stimuli, a higher percentage of correct answers on list 1, when compared to list 2. Gender comparison showed significant differences for the 5 syllables stimuli on the general analysis and on list 2, with better results for boys. CONCLUSION: there was no difference in performance up to the extension of 4 syllables. The presentation of the fluent form facilitated phonological memory performance for both male and female students when the presented stimuli were longer.