Project Portugal 2030

Summary

Taking an ecological perspective of human development and learning, this study aims to address the effects of individual and context variables on the response to intervention (RtI) of children with diverse types of reading disabilities (poor decoders, poor comprehenders and poor readers). The study will be performed with 3rd grade students, as this is a level where students learning to read in European Portuguese are expected to already master decoding skills and comprehend what they read, i. e., they should be past the initial levels of reading acquisition (Cadime et al., 2021). The first specific goal is to explore whether poor decoders, poor comprehenders and poor readers show distinct linguistic and neurocognitive profiles. We expect that poor decoders have mainly deficits in skills that research has related to the development of decoding (e.g., phonological awareness, processing/naming speed, verbal working memory (WM), verbal fluency, shifting, inhibition), whereas poor comprehenders should have no deficits in these but in skills that are involved in the construction of a mental representation of a written/oral text (e.g., background knowledge, vocabulary, planning, visuospatial WM). We expect that poor readers have a more severe deficit profile that includes most of these skills. The second goal is to explore whether the identified deficits can predict the response status (adequate or inadequate responder) after the small-group intervention. The starting point in reading skills will also be taken into account, as research has shown that inadequate responders usually enter the intervention with more impaired skills (Denton et al., 2013). The goal is to investigate whether domain-general skills have predictive power, over and above, domain-specific skills. The presence of comorbidities, the length of attendance of preschool education and the student’s sex will also be taken into account when analyzing responsiveness in each group. The third goal is to investigate whether family-related variables, such as socioeconomic status (SES), home literacy practices (including the family reading habits) and parental involvement with school, are associated to responsiveness. We predict that adequate responders will come predominantly from households with a higher SES, where literacy practices are more common and parents are more involved with their children’s learning. The last goal is to assess the Tier 1 reading instruction delivered in the classrooms attended by children and to explore whether this is associated to students’ RtI. We expect that a higher quality Tier 1 instruction leads to a higher probability of adequate response to intervention in Tier 2, i.e., we expect a cumulative effect. As the assessment of the classroom reading instruction will be made at the beginning of the school year, trough questionnaires filled by the teachers, only students that had the same teacher since entering formal schooling will be eligible for this project. Given the dimension of the project, direct observations of the Tier 1 instruction are not feasible. The data will not only allow us to conclude whether context or individual variables are the best predictors of RtI in each type of RD, but will also allow us to explore whether context variables predict individual skills (linguistic and cognitive) directly, which in turn predict RtI (i.e., whether there is a mediating effect).