Universal Screening for Prevention of Reading, Writing, and Math Disabilities in Spanish

Summary

This work presents a protocol to administrate Spanish Curriculum-Based Measures for the early detection of reading, math, and writing difficulties. These tools could help practitioners and applied researchers working in the context of the Response to Intervention model.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to describe a Spanish protocol that includes reading, writing, and math Curriculum-Based Measures (CBMs) aimed at early detection of students at risk of presenting learning disabilities (LD). Early identification of LD is a critical component of the Response to Intervention (RtI) model. In early grades, the screening of foundational skills mentioned above can provide a data-based guideline for identifying students requiring a more intensive response-based intervention before starting elementary school. We designed different CBMs based on indicators of basic early reading, writing, and math skills [Indicadores de Progreso de Aprendizaje en Lectura, Escritura y Matemáticas, IPAL, IPAE, and IPAM respectively] that aim to fulfill the twofold objective of universal screening and evaluation of the Spanish students’ progress. For reading, IPAL includes alphabetic principle, phonological awareness, concepts about print, and riddles in kindergarten. In first and second grades, IPAL includes alphabetic principle, nonsense words fluency, maze sentences, and oral reading fluency. In addition, it includes phonemic segmentation for first grade and prosody for second grade. For writing, IPAE includes copying letters, writing allographs, dictated letters, dictated words with arbitrary spelling, dictated words with rule-based spelling, dictated nonsense words, dictated sentences, writing sentences, and writing a story for first-third grades. Finally, for math, IPAM includes number comparison, missing number, number identification, quantity array, and counting aloud for kindergarten, and number comparison, multi-digit computation, missing number, single-digit computation, and place value for first-third grades.

Introduction

Response to Intervention (RtI) model is a multi-tier method for preventing and identifying learning disabilities (LD). The National Center on Response to Intervention¹ defined the four essential components of RtI: a) multi-level instructional and behavioral system for preventing school failure; b) universal screening; c) progress monitoring; and d) data-based decisions. The first step in the multi-level process is the identification of children at risk for LD using universal screening with all students. Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) is the most commonly used assessment tool, both for universal screening and progress monitoring of foundatio....

Protocol

The protocol follows the guidelines of the Ethics Committee of the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL). To be able to participate in the study, parents were required to sign a consent form. Both schools and families were informed about the purpose of the study.

NOTE: We designed a set of CBMs based on indicators of basic early reading, writing, and math skills (Indicadores del Progreso de Aprendizaje en Lectura, Escritura y Matemáticas, IPAL²⁰, IPAE²¹, and IPAM²² respectively) that aims to fulfill the twofold objective of universal screening and progress monitoring ....

Results

In this study, the students were classified following these criteria: at-risk ≤20^th (i.e., math and writing) or ≤25^th (i.e., reading), low-performance ≤40^th, average performance ≤60^th, and optimal performance >60^th. For all the parallel forms of each CBM described above, a composite score was created in order to classify students at risk in reading (IPAL), writing (IPAE), and math (IPAM). These composite scores were calculated by averaging unweighted standardized .......

Discussion

Over the last years, the Spanish government has been placing the main emphasis on a prevention system³², allowing the design of new proposals orientated to the early detection and intervention of students at risk for LD. Nevertheless, there is a lack of screening and progress monitoring tools adapted to the Spanish curriculum and which can be used by Spanish-speaking teachers. The design and standardization of the CBMs above mentioned in the Canary Islands have permitted the pilot testing of the R.......

Materials

List of materials used in this article

Name	Company	Catalog Number	Comments
Indicadores de Progreso de Aprendizaje en Escritura (IPAE) [Indicators of Basic Early Writing Skills].	Ediciones Pirámide	978-84-368-3981-4	Curriculum-Based Measure
Indicadores de Progreso de Aprendizaje en Lectura (IPAL) [Indicators of Basic Early Reading Skills]	Ediciones Pirámide	978-84-368-3981-4	Curriculum-Based Measure
Indicadores de Progreso de Aprendizaje en Matemáticas (IPAM) [Indicators of Basic Early Math Skills].	Ediciones Pirámide	978-84-368-3981-4	Curriculum-Based Measure
Stopwatch 1/1005 Kalenji 100	OXYLANE	02.314.041/001-88	1/100 Stopwatch with 1 lap times