The Lexercise Mississippi Dyslexia Screener: Background & Guidance

What is a screening test?

Unlike most tests or assessments, screening tests are designed simply to sort those who are likely to have some problem(s) from those who probably do not.

While these tests don’t permit a diagnosis, they are quick to administer and indicate who may need additional evaluation or support.

Over the past decade, researchers have identified certain basic skills that are strong predictors of future success in reading, writing, and spelling. Assessments for these skills, called Curriculum Based Measures (CBMs), are already used by many schools and districts across the country.

Schools have embraced CBMs because they provide a cost-effective way of identifying which students are most in need of intervention to prevent long-term problems with literacy.  Recent research has confirmed the validity of this type of screening and progress-monitoring (Catts, et al., 2015). 

What is the Mississippi Screener?

In the summer of 2012, the state of Mississippi passed legislation requiring that schools screen kindergarten and first grade students in six areas that are generally deficit in people with dyslexia. Lexercise created the Mississippi Screener by aligning five well-researched CBMs with the components required under the Mississippi law:

SCORING

The Lexercise Mississippi Dyslexia Screener scoring is designed to facilitate the process of screening for language-literacy difficulties while permitting districts, schools and/or clinics to develop their own procedures for following up on students based on their pattern of scores.

For example, some districts may choose to refer students who score at-risk for a comprehensive assessment while other districts may choose to provide classroom intervention(s) and then re-assess them.  Districts may also choose to use specific interventions with students who score in the at-risk range on specific sub-tests (e.g., a specific spelling intervention with 1st graders who score in the at-risk range on the spelling sub-test). 

AT RISK results on 3 or more subtests =  AT RISK 

AT RISK  on 1 or 2 subtests  = SOME RISK

Guidance for administering the Mississippi Screener

1. The Mississippi Screener should be administered by an education or clinical professional who has had basic training in the principles of individual assessment.

2. Professionals should consider child factors that might contraindicate or mitigate the use of this screener (e.g., sensory and/or physical disability, developmental delay, cultural and/or language differences).

3. The screener is designed with automated scoring to identify kindergarten and 1^st grade students who need further evaluation. The screener is not designed as a progress-monitoring tool or for diagnostic purposes.

STEPS to administering the Lexercise Mississippi Screener:

1.   Print (in color) the 10 pages of Student Materials.

    a.   If the materials will be used with multiple students, consider laminating the pages or inserting them in plastic page protectors.

           b.  Putting these pages in a 3-ring binder will help keep them in order.                                             

2.  Click through the online screener to learn how each assessment is started and stopped and how the student’s responses are scored and recorded. (If you want, you can practice administering the screener to volunteer adults or children until you feel confident.)

3.  Decide how many children you plan to screen and how you will schedule them for screening. The Mississippi Screener is individually administered. Plan about 15 minutes per student.

4.  To save time, consider beginning your screening by administrating the Spelling Assessment in a group format before moving on to individual administration for the remaining assessments. Here’s how:

a.   Give each student a copy of the Spelling Assessment Student Response form (p. 3) and a pencil.

b.  Make sure each student writes his/her name on the top of the form.

c.   Navigate to the first assessment in the online screener and give the online directions to the group.

d.   Call out the spelling words as directed.

e.   Pick up the Student Response forms, grade them and put them in a file.

f.   Proceed to administer the rest of the screener to students individually. When a student presents for screening, begin by retrieving that student’s spelling Student Response form and mark their responses to the online scoring.

ANNOTATED REFERENCES

1) Blackwell, E., Durkee, N., Flynn, P. and Barrie-Blackley, S. (2014).  The Interscorer Reliability of the Lexercise Mississippi Dyslexia Screener.  Poster Session, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Convention. San Diego, CA.

Scorer reliability has been a problem with assessments of early reading skills, especially in assessments of phonological   segmentation (Reed & Sturges, 2012).  This research was undertaken to document the interscorer reliability for outcomes on the Lexercise Mississippi Screener.  In screening 21 1st graders, two Communication Sciences and Disorders graduate students agreed 90% of the time on the outcome, an acceptable level of agreement for a screening assessment.  Most disagreement occurred on the Phoneme Segmentation Subtest.   Additional guidance was added to this subtest to deal with the specific areas of disagreement.

2) Catts, H.W., Nielsen, D.C., Bridges, M.S., Lui, Y.S. and Bontempo, D.E. (2015) Early identification of reading  disabilities within an RtI framework. J. Learning Disabilities, 48 (3), p. 281-97.

This research supports the following 4 tasks for a screening battery in grades K-1: letter fluency, phonological awareness, rapid naming, non-word repetition.

3) Coady, J.A. (2013). Rapid Naming by Children With and Without Specific Language IMpairment. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, Vol. 56, p. 604-617.

This research explains why rapid naming tasks are included in language-literacy assessments with young children.

4) Georgiou, G.K., Parrila, R., Cui, Y. and Papadopoulos, T.C.  (2013).  Why is rapid automatized naming related to reading? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Vol. 115 (1), pp. 218-225.  DO  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2012.10.015  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022096512002159

This research indicates that rapid automatized naming (RAN) predicts reading skills because "both involve serial processing and oral production of the names of the stimuli".

5) Jiban, C. (2013). Early Childhood Assessment: Implementing Effective Practice: A research-based guide to inform assessment planning in the early grades. Northwest Evaluation Association.  http://info.nwea.org/rs/nwea/images/EarlyChildhoodAssessment-ImplementingEffectivePractice.pdf

This guide provides an orientation to assessment (including screening) of young children.

6) Macdonald, H.H., Sullivan, A. L. and Walkins, M.W. (2013). Multivariate Screening Model for Later Word Reading Achievement: Predictive Utility of Pre-reading Skills and Cognitive Ability. Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 29 (1), pp. 52-71.  http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15377903.2013.751476#.UhTdsLxnDiM

These researchers found that a combination of predictor variables is more effective than single measures in predicting later word reading and reading fluency, with cognitive ability, phonemic awareness, and letter knowledge contributing significantly to the prediction of skill.

7) Reed, D.K. and  Sturges, K.M. (2012). An Examination of Assessment Fidelity in the Administration and Interpretation of Reading Tests. Remedial and Special Education, Vol 34 (5), 259-268.

8) Snow, C. E., Burns, M. S., & Griffin, P. (Eds.). (1998). Preventing reading difficulties in young children.Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

In the late 1990s this National Research Council report on preventing reading problems in young children concluded that the majority of reading problems could be prevented.

9) van den Bos, K.P., Zijlstra, B.J.H. and lutje Spelberg, H.C. (2002). Life-Span Date on Continuous Naming Speeds of Numbers, Letters, Colors and Pictured Objects and Word-Reading Speed, Scientific Studies of Reading, 6(1), 25-49.

This is one of the few studies of rapid naming across the lifespan.