Literacy Screening Tool Developed for Young Children

Article: Book Developed at Cincinnati Children’s Helps Identify Risks of Reading Difficulties in Preschool-Age Kids
Source: Cincinnati Children's Hospital
Published: February 4, 2021

Correlations between The Reading House total scores and
gray matter cortical thickness (thicker areas shown in red)

“By screening early during pediatric clinic visits, especially in practices serving disadvantaged families, we can hopefully target effective interventions that help children better prepare for kindergarten and improve reading outcomes,” the author of a book called The Reading House  offers. The researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital developed the book (series) as a literacy screening tool for children ages 3 to 5 to facilitate the early identification of reading difficulties in primary care and preschool settings. The present study, involving 70 healthy children (34 boys and 36 girls) between 3 and 5 years of age from various socioeconomic backgrounds, sought to validate the book as a literacy screening tool. The children completed standardized assessments of literacy skills related to vocabulary, rhyming and rapid automatized naming. Fifty-two of these children also completed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), including measurement of cortical thickness, with thicker cortices (especially in the left hemisphere involved with language processing) being predictive of better reading outcomes. They found thicker gray matter cortex in the cerebral left hemisphere in children with higher TRH scores. Higher TRH scores were also strongly correlated with higher vocabulary, rhyming and rapid naming scores, according to the researchers. Finally, the researchers found that children from lower-SES households had a less mature ("strained") cortical pattern and thinner cortices overall compared to children from higher-SES households.

Personal commentary: Although there are potential conflicts of interest in this study in the sense that the author of the study is also the creator of the product used for testing, and the aim of the study was to validate the tool, that in itself does not limit the evidence. Incorporating MRI to measure correlations in scores from the assessment in different demographics of children produced findings that were within statistical significance. The sample size is small, and extrapolation of the conclusions should be done with caution. That being said, although the product can be used as regular reading material, and participants in the study were encouraged to engage their children in literacy at home, the aim of the study was diagnostic rather than therapeutic. As there is no intervention prescribed from the tool, little harm can come from using it as a basic screening assessment, especially for populations that have less access to literacy material otherwise.

My rating of this study: ⭐

Hutton JS, Dudley J, Huang G, et al. "Validation of The Reading House  and Association With Cortical Thickness." Pediatrics.  147(3):e20201641. March 2021. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2020-1641