What is it about?
Identifying children who may struggle with learning to read early enough to provide support is important, but reading screeners need to work well for children from different language backgrounds. This is particularly challenging for multilingual children, whose developing English skills can sometimes be mistaken for reading difficulties. We propose a framework for developing reading screeners that considers four things: how accurately they identify children at risk, whether the results are useful for instruction, whether they provide information that can guide further assessment, and whether the screener is practical to use in schools. We applied this framework to data from more than 3,000 kindergarten through second-grade students across California. We evaluated brief combinations of reading and language tasks in English and Spanish and examined how well they predicted reading performance at the end of the school year. The results show that brief, multi-task screeners can identify many children who are likely to struggle with reading while also providing information about different reading-related skills. They also show why a child’s language background needs to be considered carefully when designing and interpreting reading screening.
Featured Image
Photo by Adam Winger on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Reading difficulties are easier to address when children who need support are identified early. However, screening can be less accurate for multilingual children when differences in language experience or proficiency are mistaken for reading difficulties. Our findings show that effective reading screening should consider more than prediction accuracy alone. A useful screener should also help educators understand a child’s strengths and needs, provide information that can guide further assessment, and be brief enough to use routinely in schools. Developing screening approaches that account for children’s linguistic backgrounds could help schools identify reading difficulties more equitably and provide appropriate support earlier.
Perspectives
When we evaluate a reading screener, it is tempting to ask a single question: How accurately does it identify children at risk? But accuracy is only part of what makes a screener useful in a school. We wanted to take a broader view. Screening takes time away from instruction, so the information it provides should ideally help educators decide what to do next. At the same time, screening results need to be interpreted carefully for multilingual children, because performance in the language of assessment can reflect both reading ability and a child’s experience with that language. Our findings reinforce the importance of considering these issues together. The goal should not simply be to identify as many children at risk as possible, but to develop screening systems that are accurate, informative, practical, and responsive to the linguistic diversity of the children they are intended to serve.
Dr Julian M Siebert
University of California San Francisco
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A comprehensive framework for the development and evaluation of linguistically fair universal reading screening systems in educational settings., Journal of Educational Psychology, October 2026, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/edu0001085.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
