Francisca Serrano

Background: This study explored the differential effects of a comprehensive intervention program for improving literacy skills in monolingual children with learning difficulties (LD) from Spain, enrolled in the second (Grades 3 and 4; aged 8–10 years) and third cycles (Grades 5 and 6; aged 10–12 years) of primary school. Methods: A quasi‐experimental pre–post intervention design with three groups (intervention [LD‐i], waiting‐control [LD‐w] and typical development [TD]) was used. A total of 34 second‐cycle and 9 third‐cycle children received 16 individualized sessions of explicit, systematic, and intensive training in reading, decoding, phonological, orthographic, prosodic, and morphological skills, at the sublexical and lexical levels. Evidence‐based practices such as repeated practice and game‐based techniques were applied, considering multisensory and cognitive approaches. The LD‐i group was compared with the LD‐w group (38 second‐cycle and 20 third‐cycle children) and with the TD group (31 second‐cycle and 25 third‐cycle children), who received regular school instruction. Results: Differential effects across cycles were observed after the intervention: second‐cycle children in the LD‐i group outperformed the LD‐w group in phonological, orthographic and prosodic skills, reducing performance gaps with the TD group. Third‐cycle students did not show statistical differences when compared with their LD‐w peers. At the same time, both cycles showed similar gains after receiving the intervention, except for a word dictation task where second‐cycle children improved more. Conclusions: These findings highlight the importance of comprehensive, early, age‐sensitive, and balanced literacy instruction to address LD, especially when older children experience persistent difficulties.

Although children who grow up in a low socioeconomic situation present deficits in literacy skills, the present research aimed to shed light on the skills they possess and how detecting them can help improve their development. A total of 439 children were analysed for their literacy skills, learning potential in reading‐ and writing‐related skills as determined by dynamic assessment methodology, and behaviour during the test situation. Participants belonged to three groups: children with socioeconomic disadvantage, children with literacy difficulties and children with typical development. Results showed that children with socioeconomic disadvantage and those with literacy difficulties showed similar results in traditional reading and writing tests. Nonetheless, children with socioeconomic disadvantage showed higher learning potential in these skills than children with literacy difficulties. This result supports the accuracy of dynamic assessment for classification. In addition, the behavioural profile in a test situation differed between the groups. The study conclusions relate to the importance of developing intervention programmes in reading and writing skills for children at risk of learning difficulties, considering not only their initial level but also their learning potential and behavioural profiles.

This study explores the effectiveness of a comprehensive intervention program for improving writing skills in Spanish. Participants were 167 Spanish children (3rd to 6th Grades) with reading and writing difficulties and typical development. Children exhibited problems in writing, reading, and related skills, like phonological and prosodic skills. The intervention targeted the reinforcement of orthographic patterns, decoding activities based on meta-analytical strategies; meta-phonological, morphological, and prosodic activities; visual vocabulary; sentence building, and reading, considering the reciprocity between both skills in literacy development. It was a paper-and-pencil program, considering the main approaches of writing intervention (cognitive and multisensorial), the relevance of frequent and direct feedback, the use of explicit instructions, the recommended levels of intervention (sub-lexical, lexical, and sentence levels), and the use of motivating activities through a game-based design. Sixteen individualized sessions of direct, systematic, and explicit training were conducted with the support of a trainer who provided immediate and continuous feedback. A quasi-experimental non-equivalent waiting control group pre-post intervention design, with three groups (intervention group; waiting-control group; and typical development group), was applied. Results showed that the intervention had a positive impact on writing-related skills. Specifically, children who received the intervention performed close to peers without difficulties in several tasks after the intervention program, especially those involving phonological and prosodic processing. These findings support that phonological and prosodic training is related to writing performance and its development. Furthermore, this study presents psychoeducational implications because it supports that explicit and supplemental meta-phonological strategies could play an important role in teaching writing to children with reading and writing difficulties.

Dysphagia is a symptom that appears with high prevalence in persons diagnosed with dementia, intellectual disability, or severe mental illness. Risk of aspiration pneumonia or even death is very high in these populations. However, screening for dysphagia risk in these patients is complicated by the fact that most of them suffer from cognitive impairments and behavioral manifestations that hinder the assessment process using the existing screening tests. The aim of this study was to validate the Oropharyngeal Dysphagia Screening Test for Patients and Professionals, in patients with cognitive impairment (dementia/intellectual disability) or with severe mental illness (schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, bipolar disorder, or major depressive disorder). For this purpose, 148 institutionalized patients were evaluated by professionals responsible for their food intake. The Oropharyngeal Dysphagia Screening Test for Patients and Professionals was used to assess its validity in screening for oropharyngeal dysphagia in patients with cognitive impairments and in patients with severe mental illness. Also, the Eating Assessment Tool-10 and the Swallowing Disturbance Questionnaire were used for convergent reliability procedures. Four comparison groups were established: patients with cognitive impairment with and without oropharyngeal dysphagia, and patients with severe mental illness with and without oropharyngeal dysphagia. Results from the Oropharyngeal Dysphagia Screening Test for Patients and Professionals adequately distinguished between groups with and without dysphagia, in addition to presenting adequate levels of convergent validity and reliability. These results were obtained from other-reports (professionals responsible for patients’ food intake), using a simple, quickly applied test that does not require the use of food in patients with an altered cognitive state or with severe mental illness. With this study we expand the validity of the Oropharyngeal Dysphagia Screening Test for Patients and Professionals in populations with severe cognitive deficits and mental illness in which there is a great deficiency of oropharyngeal dysphagia screening instruments.

Endogenous visual attention orienting is early available from infancy. It shows a steady development during the preschool period towards monitoring and managing executive attention to optimize the interplay between environmental contingencies and internal goals. The current study aims at understanding this transition from basic forms of endogenous control of visual orienting towards the engagement of executive attention, as well as their association with individual differences in temperament and home environment. A total of 150 children between 2 and 4 years of age were evaluated in a Visual Sequence Learning task, measuring visual anticipations in easy (context-free) and complex (context-dependent) stimuli transitions. Results showed age to be a predictor of a reduction in exogenous attention, as well as increased abilities to attempt to anticipate and to correctly anticipate in complex transitions. Household disorganization predicted more complex correct anticipations, suggesting that the exposure to more unpredictable environments could benefit learning in context-dependent settings. Finally, temperamental surgency was found to be positively related to sustained attention in the task. Results are informative of age differences in visual attention control during toddlerhood and early childhood, and their association with temperament and home environment.

This study focused on psycho-affective and behavioral problems in children and adolescents with dyslexia. It aims to define clinical psycho-affective and behavioral profiles of dyslexia beyond those found in existing descriptions of the cognitive, neural, and behavioral correlates. The study focused specifically on the understudied population of native Italian-speaking students. Characteristics of anxiety and self-esteem, as psycho-affective factors, and a variety of associated behavioral problems were studied in a sample of children and adolescents with dyslexia (n = 22) and compared to those of a group without learning disabilities (n = 25). The findings suggest the group of participants diagnosed with dyslexia exhibited psycho-affective symptoms, especially anxiety and low self-esteem in social, and academic situations more frequently than the control group. These problems were related to reading measures. More research is needed to determine how they are related and their interaction. Overall, these findings are useful in clarifying the profile of psycho-affective symptoms in the development of academic difficulties in children and adolescents with dyslexia. In some cases, school personnel focus their interventions only on the academic difficulties and not the psycho-affective or behavioral problems. These findings could have implications regarding intervention for this population.

This article describes an intervention program to improve writing skills, intended to be a useful tool for everyday remedial work in primary school. The design was based on an initial review of the approaches most often used for writing intervention and identification of the main concerns for such intervention; namely, the use of direct and explicit instructions, the importance of feedback, recommended levels of intervention, the main content to consider, and use of motivating activities to get the student engaged or even to enjoy the intervention. All these considerations guided decision making about the appropriate features that would ensure an effective intervention in children with general and specific writing difficulties. The intervention program follows evidence-based practice strategies and may be useful for educational professionals in primary school, acknowledging that the program needs to be experimentally evaluated.

This study examined reasoning skills in children, specifically transitive reasoning and the visual impedance effect, with a new visual/pictorial task. The visual impedance effect is the effect produced by the possible interference in the reasoning process of irrelevant details elicited from the premises of a reasoning task. The new task had no reading requirements, which made it suitable for testing reasoning in primary school children, especially children with reading difficulties (RD), such as dyslexia. The study aimed also to validate the possible use of the task for studying reasoning and detecting the visual impedance effect without the interference of reading skills and to investigate the association between transitive reasoning and reading abilities. A pilot study (N = 10) was used to test the suitability of the new task for primary school children. Afterwards, the task was tested on a larger sample of children of third to sixth Grade, with and without RD (N = 84). Results showed that the new task is able to detect the main reasoning effects as well as the visual impedance effect. The findings are discussed, with the new task considered appropriate for studying reasoning skills in child populations both with and without RD.

Dysphagia is a very common symptom in people of advanced age and with neurological diseases, although it often remains undiagnosed. At present, there are few assessment tools adapted for the Spanish-speaking population; of the few existing, most of them follow a self-reporting format, which requires a well-preserved cognitive state in the patient in order to be tested. Therefore, the main aim of this study was to design and validate an instrument for screening dysphagia without food, which could have a quick application and did not compromise the patient’s safety. A secondary aim was to study the test’s ability to examine this symptom in people with cognitive disorders. The study was carried out with 206 participants divided into three groups: people with dysphagia and with preserved cognitive abilities, people with dysphagia and with altered cognitive abilities, and people without dysphagia and with preserved cognitive skills (control group). Participants were assessed with the designed Oropharyngeal Dysphagia Screening Test for Patients and Professionals and other dysphagia tests. The results revealed appropriate psychometric features: reliability and validity both for screening dysphagia directly with the patients or if the tester is the professional caregiver responsible for feeding (in cases of altered cognitive abilities). As conclusion, the Oropharyngeal Dysphagia Screening Test for Patients and Professionals is an instrument of easy use and of short duration that has shown adequate results of reliability and validity, thus being useful for the screening of dysphagia in Spanish-speaking populations.