Maristella Scorza

Assessing Decoding Ability The Role of Speed and Accuracy and a New Composite Indicator to Measure Decoding Skill in Elementary Grades

Tools for assessing decoding skill in students attending elementary grades are of fundamental importance for guaranteeing an early identification of reading disabled students and reducing both the primary negative effects (on learning) and the secondary negative effects (on the development of the personality) of this disability. This article presents results obtained by administering existing standardized tests of reading and a new screening procedure to about 1,500 students in the elementary grades in Italy. It is found that variables measuring speed and accuracy in all administered reading tests are not Gaussian, and therefore the threshold values used for classifying a student as a normal decoder or as an impaired decoder must be estimated on the basis of the empirical distribution of these variables rather than by using the percentiles of the normal distribution. It is also found that the decoding speed and the decoding accuracy can be measured in either a 1-minute procedure or in much longer standardized tests. The screening procedure and the tests administered are found to be equivalent insofar as they carry the same information. Finally, it is found that speed and accuracy act as complementary effects in the measurement of decoding ability. On the basis of this last finding, the study introduces a new composite indicator aimed at determining the student’s performance, which combines speed and accuracy in the measurement of decoding ability.

A new procedure to measure children's reading speed and accuracy in Italian

Impaired readers in primary school should be early recognized, in order to asses a targeted intervention within the school and to start a teaching that respects the difficulties in learning to read, to write and to perform calculations. Screening procedures, inside the primary schools aimed at detecting children with difficulties in reading, are of fundamental importance for guaranteeing an early identification of dyslexic children and reducing both the primary negative effects--on learning--and the secondary negative effects--on the development of the personality--of this disturbance. In this study, we propose a new screening procedure measuring reading speed and accuracy. This procedure is very fast (it is exactly 1 min long), simple, cheap and can be provided by teachers without technical knowledge. On the contrary, most of the currently used diagnostic tests are about 10 min long and must be provided by experts. These two major flaws prevent the widespread use of these tests. On the basis of the results obtained in a survey on about 1500 students attending primary school in Italy, we investigate the relationships between variables used in the screening procedure and variables measuring speed and accuracy in the currently used diagnostic tests in Italy. Then, we analyse the validity of the screening procedure from a statistical point of view, and with an explorative factor analysis, we show that reading speed and accuracy seem to be two separate symptoms of the dyslexia phenomenon.

Beyond Verbal Behavior: An Empirical Analysis of Speech Rates in Psychotherapy Sessions

Objective: The present work aims to detect the role of the rate of speech as a mechanism able to give information on patients intrapsychic activity and the intersubjective quality of the patient–therapist relationship. Method: Thirty clinical sessions among five patients were sampled and divided into idea units (N = 1276) according to the referential activity method. Each idea unit was rated according to referential activity method and in terms of speech rate (syllables per second) for both patient and therapist. A mixed-effects model was applied in order to detect the relationship between the speech rate of both the patient and the therapist and the features of the patients verbal production in terms of referential activity scales. A Pearson correlation was applied to evaluate the synchrony between the speech rate of the patient and the therapist. Results: Results highlight that speech rate varies according patients ability to get in touch with specific aspects detected through referential activity method: patient and the therapist speech rate get synchronized during the course of the sessions; and the therapists speech rate partially attunes to the patients ability to get in touch with inner aspects detected through RA method. Conclusion: The work identified speech rate as a feature that may help in the development of the clinical process in light of its ability to convey information about a patients internal states and a therapists attunement ability. These results support the intersubjective perspective on the clinical process.

Declarative learning of new real-words in primary and secondary school children: evidence of consolidation over time

Recent studies found evidence for improvements of declarative memories after a period of offline consolidation. Most of these studies investigated declarative learning using non-words stimuli. Little is known about consolidation effects in the acquisition of phonologically typical real-words in the native-language. The current study compared primary school children with secondary school children in recognition and delayed recall of novel real-words. The delayed recognition and recall tasks were administered both 15 minutes and 24 hours after training. The results revealed high recognition accuracy of the novel real-words after 15-min delay. In contrast, children’s recall ability decreased at the first post-training delayed recall but significantly improved when children were re-tested one day later. Better overall performances were observed in secondary school children. The results of our semantic declarative memory task replicate and extend previous findings showing that children’s retention of novel semantic-phonological representations is more robust following a period of sleep.

Some Experimental Results on the Role of Speed and Accuracy of Reading in Psychometric Tests

According to the Italian Parliament act (n. 170/2010) that recognizes dyslexia as a physical disturbance, of neurobiological origin, dyslexic children in primary school should be early recognized, in order to assess a targeted intervention within the school and to start a teaching that respects the difficulties in learning to read, to write, and to perform calculations. Screening procedures inside the primary schools aimed at detecting children with difficulties in reading are not so common in Italy as in other European countries. Nevertheless, screening procedures are of fundamental importance for guaranteeing an early detection of dyslexic children and reducing both the primary negative effects—on learning—and the secondary negative effects—on the development of the personality—of this disturbance. In this study we analyze the validity, from a statistical point of view, of a screening procedure recently proposed in the psychometric literature (Stella et al., SPILLO Strumento per l’identificazione della lentezza nella lettura orale. Software per la verifica delle abilit di lettura dei bambini della scuola primaria (dalla prima alla quinta). Giunti Scuola, Florence, 2011). This procedure is very fast (it is exactly one minute long), simple, cheap and can be dispensed by teachers without psychometric experience. On the contrary, the currently used tests are much longer and must be provided by skilled teachers. These two major flaw prevent the widespread use of these tests. If the new procedure is found to be reliable, it can be provided to each student in primary school and it can also be repeated in time, in order to monitor the children difficulties. The validity of the procedure and the benchmark with two currently used tests are studied on the basis of the results of a survey on about 1,500 students attending primary school.