BÄST I TEST : Identifiering av läs- och skrivsvårigheter med stöd av ett digitalt verktyg

Sammanfattning

The purpose of this study is to investigate the extent to which a digital screening tool can distinguish students with identified reading and writing difficulties from students without such difficulties in year 6. Early interventions are important, but so is the continued work of continuously following up and evaluating measures taken to support students who need help with reading and writing. This calls for effective methods to identify difficulties and where digital mapping tools can be a support. The study has a quantitative approach and is based on the digital test Dysmate-C, witch is carried out both in groups an individually with pupils in the sixth grade. Questionnaires answered by mentors and special educators are the basis for the assessment of the students reading and writing skills and are used in the sudy to compare the test results. 43 students aged 11-12 in year 6 participated in the study and of these students, 20 had been identified with reading and writing difficulties based on the teachers' assessments. The analysis is based on a cognitive perspective on reading and writing development through the Simple View of Reading model (SVR), where reading ability is understood as an interaction between decoding and language comprehension. The results show that the subtests in Dysmate-C that measure decoding and spelling-related skills can distinguish the group of students with identified reading and writing difficulties from the group without identified difficulties. Furthermore, the results show a relatively good agreement between the teachers' assessments of students' reading skills and results on decoding tests in Dysmate-C, but low agreement in terms of reading comprehension. In summary, the results in our study show that Dysmate-C can differentiate between the groups with and without difficulty in most subtests. The results also show that the teachers' assessments of the students' abilitys correspond relatively well with the outcome.