Purpose

The Test for the Detection and Investigation of Reading Difficulties is a tool for the analytical assessment of the core parameters that support and constitute the reading process. The main aim is the early identification of preschool-aged children with reading difficulties, so that these can be addressed before their transition to primary school. An additional goal is to explore the key parameters contributing to reading that are associated with reading difficulties.

Scoring

The test includes 9 assessment tasks, which examine four parameters of cognitive-psychological functioning:
Visual perception
Auditory perception and processing
Lexical ability
Phonological awareness and skill
The tasks include exercises such as copying and completing missing sentences, phoneme discrimination, word segmentation into syllables, and reading words and texts.

Sample

The test was standardized on a total of 1,180 children: 400 from the kindergarten age group, 392 from 1st grade, and 388 from 2nd grade of primary school. All students had Greek as their native language.

Validity and Reliability

All tasks demonstrated satisfactory content validity. The correlation coefficient between the pseudoword reading and pseudoword repetition tasks was r = 0.39. Regarding reliability, Cronbach’s alpha was calculated separately for each task by age group and was found to be above 0.80, except for the number sequence memory task, for which the alpha value was 0.75. In addition, test-retest reliability varied, with coefficients ranging from 0.52 to 0.86.

Main Bibliographic Sources

Porpodas, K. A. (2002). Reading. Patras: self-published.
Porpodas, K. A. (2003). Learning and Its Difficulties (A Cognitive Approach). Patras: self-published.