Anxiety and Response to Reading Intervention among First Grade Students

For school-aged children with reading difficulties, an emerging and important area of investigation concerns determining predictors of intervention response. Previous studies have focused exclusively on cognitive and broadly defined behavioral variables. What has been missing, however, are studies examining anxiety, which is among the most commonly experienced difficulty for youth.

The present study examined anxiety among children classified as typically achieving or showing inadequate/adequate response following an intervention for reading problems.

Participants were 153 ethnically-diverse children (84 male, 69 female) evaluated in the winter and spring of their first-grade academic year. Children completed several standardized measures of reading achievement involving decoding and fluency along with a multidimensional anxiety rating scale.

Repeated measures ANOVA revealed significant main effects for time and scale and significant interactions for time*scale and group*scale. Logistic regression examined whether anxiety predicted response to intervention (Y/N) at the end of the school-year.

Results showed overall decreases in anxiety over time, with the exception of the harm avoidance area which increased and also interacted with group (children with decoding/fluency difficulties reported less harm avoidance than typically achieving children). The harm avoidance area was most pertinent across analyses highlighting the potential importance of targeting this area; however, none of the anxiety scales predicted response group at the end of the intervention. Ongoing research is needed in this area in order to identify characteristics of inadequate responders to reading intervention programs and/or inform interventions that incorporate these socioemotional factors.