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Development of a 5-item parent questionnaire to screen preschool children for reading problems
Sai Nandini Iyer1, Mark I Sawyer, Marcus Germany
11MetroHealth Medical Center, Cleveland, OH, USA.
Objective:
To develop a brief tool for screening of emergent literacy skills in preschool children (3-5 years old) in pediatric clinics.
Methods:
Parents were given an 8-item questionnaire, and the children were tested with the Get Ready to Read-Revised (GRTR-R) screener. With the GRTR-R score as gold standard, the parent questionnaire was optimized using various combinations of questions and response weights in one half of the sample. The resulting 5-item questionnaire was then validated using the other half of the sample.
Results:
A total of 203 patients were enrolled. In the validation sample, the 5-item questionnaire had sensitivity and specificity vis-à-vis the GRTR-R of 100% and 78.6% in 5-year-olds (cutoff score of 8) and 78.6% and 68.2% in 4-year-olds (cutoff of 6). The questionnaire did not perform well in 3-year-olds.
Conclusion:
A very brief parent questionnaire may be useful as a first-line screener for early reading problems.
