How are Reading Disabilities Operationalized in Spain? A Study of Practicing School Psychologists

Gonzalez Valenzuela Mj,Soriano Ferrer M

doi:10.4172/2472-1786.100031

Abstract

This study examines how 115 Spanish school psychologists rated the importance of certain criteria for identifying reading disabilities (RD), and compares their views with those of their US counterparts. The sample comprised school psychologists primarily between 30 and 39 years of age who had been in professional practice for less than ten years. The survey questions followed those used by Spanish practicing school psychologists ascribe the greatest importance to the discrepancy between listening and reading comprehension and to the IQ-achievement discrepancy criterion, while US school psychologists place greater emphasis on response to intervention (RTI) criteria and cognitive processing difficulties when operationalizing RD. Possible reasons for these differences are discussed. Differences between Spanish and US school psychologists are also observed in prioritizing which exclusion criteria were most important to consider when attempting to identify RD, even though the most popular choices were mental retardation and inadequate instruction in both samples.

Highlights

When presented with the list of potential criteria for identifying specific reading disabilities (RD), the proportion of Spanish school psychologists who strongly agreed or agreed with the need to use the criterion of IQ cut-off score was 54.8%; the response to intervention (RTI) criterion, 53.9%; the criterion of discrepancy between listening and reading comprehension, 81.7%; cognitive processing difficulties, 67%; phonemic awareness cut-off score, 68.7%; Reading achievement cut-off score, 62.6%; IQ-achievement discrepancy, 74.8%; intra-individual discrepancy, 60%; and curriculum-based measurement, 53% (Table 2)
The criterion which held the greatest agreement among Spanish respondents was the discrepancy between listening and reading comprehension (81.7%), followed by the IQ-achievement discrepancy, the phonemic awareness cut-off score, cognitive processing difficulties, the reading achievement cut-off score and intra-individual discrepancy criteria
The criteria for defining RD that produced the highest levels of strong disagreement/disagreement were treatment validity/ RTI, cognitive processing difficulties, intra-individual discrepancy, curriculum-based measurement and the IQ cut-off score, followed by the IQ-achievement discrepancy and the discrepancy between listening and reading comprehension (13% and 6.1%, respectively)

Summary

Introduction

The emphasis has been on establishing a set of exclusion criteria that could be applied when seeking to identify LD [1, 2] This is reflected in the internationally recognized definition proposed by the National Joint Committee on Learning Disabilities [3] and backed by the ICD-10 [4] and the DSM-5 [5], a definition that is based predominantly on exclusion and discrepancy based criteria, without specifying how these should be quantified. A recent alternative to diagnostic-criteria based models is what is known as response to intervention (RTI), a model that likewise shifts the emphasis away from the ability-achievement discrepancy [21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33].

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Conclusion