A National Research Council report on preventing reading disabilities or developmental dyslexia in young children (Snow, Bums, & Griffin, 1998) concludes that the majority of reading problems could be prevented by reducing the number of children who enter school inadequately prepared in at least three critical, and potentially remediable domains: Phonological processing; knowledge about print; and vocabulary. These combined domains are not assessed adequately by existing measures of reading readiness, and intervention activities that facilitate their development are absent from preschool curricula. This Phase I application has two specific aims. The first is to evaluate the feasibility of a test that will assess the three critical domains. Test development will feature state-of-the-art procedures for item selection and evaluation, with particular sensitivity to children at risk for reading failure due to poverty, limited English proficiency, and parental history of reading failure. An initial evaluation of the psychometric properties of the test will be completed by administering it to 300 3- to 5-year-old children.
The second aim i s to produce and complete an initial evaluation of prototypic intervention activities for each domain. The initial evaluation will be accomplished in a pilot study of 30 3- to 5-year-old children at-risk for reading failure.
The test and training activities to be produced should be widely used in preschool settings including Head Start centers.
