Screening Pediatric Patients for Reading difficulties Test: Draft (SPRouT-D)

The Screening Pediatric Patients for Reading difficulties Test: Draft (SPRouT-D) is a brief checklist that takes two-to-three minutes to administer and is designed to assess early markers of reading disabilities/dyslexia in children from pre-K to second grade. It is important to note that this tool is not yet a scientifically validated screening instrument (nor is it a diagnostic instrument), but it is an evidence-based checklist designed in the interest of practical rigor for clinicians. The goal of the checklist is to provide a formative assessment that will identify children at risk for these challenges who require further investigation in the context of a busy pediatric practice. The SPRouT-D consists of two sections: a history and brief assessment. There are five different forms of the assessment based on a child’s educational experience (from no early childhood educational experience to the second grade). The first section of the instrument is the history, which focuses on risk factors such as family history, developmental language delay and phonemic awareness challenges. The second section, which is a brief clinical assessment, consists of five-to-eight items (depending on the child’s educational experience) that briefly evaluate literacy precursors, including phonemic awareness (rhyming, letter identification, phoneme matching, sound/symbol association, sound/syllable deletion, phoneme blending, nonsense word decoding) and working memory. The SPRouT-D is not a validated instrument, and normative scores are not yet available. Our goal with this first version of the tool was to optimize the instrument’s sensitivity with conservative thresholds for follow-up and referral as indicated in the preliminary scoring tables. We are sharing this draft version of the SPRouT-D and invite researchers and clinicians to review it, use it, and provide comments on it. Further development of the tool will involve validation and the authors are seeking clinical partners for this next step. For this phase we encourage researchers to share normative data with us. Once these findings are available, they will be incorporated and shared with the research and clinical communities.