Validation of a Screening Tool for Learning Disorder in Children

Learning disorder (LD) is a common cause for poor academic performance among school students. Poor detection of this may be due to lack of proper validated diagnostic and screening tools, leading to considerable difficulty for affected children and their families. This study aims to validate a screening tool developed by us among students with poor scholastic performance. It is an easy-to-use tool that can be used by parents or teachers. Preliminary validation was done earlier using case-control design among 100 students, and the results were encouraging.

A tool with 26 items was applied in 365 schoolchildren with poor scholastic performance in Calicut district. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis was done to find area under curve (AUC) and to obtain the sensitivity and specificity at the predefined cutoff score ≥10.

ROC analysis showed AUC of 0.93 for differentiating LD cases against the normal children. The optimum cutoff was taken as score ≥10 which has a sensitivity and specificity of 84.7% and 100%, respectively.

The new tool showed promising validity.