SPILLO: un nuovo strumento per l’identificazione della lentezza nella lettura orale

The act of Parliament n. 170 (approved the 8th October 2010), on «the newstatutory law for learning disorders affecting the scholastic population» states thatdyslexia is a neurobiologically based dysfunction, which makes learning to read, to write and to perform calculations for intelligent children who do not have any othertypes of disorder, very difficult. According to this act, those who teach a dyslexicchild in school should respect the pace and the learning styles of the individual andshould include a system of assessment that takes into account the different skillareas of student. The early detection of children in primary school becomes of fundamentalimportance. Procedures for recognizing dyslexic children are based on readingperformance. In this paper a new screening is presented. Its new features are thetime saving (it is exactly one minute long), cheap and very easy to implement.If this screening procedure is found to be reliable, it can be provided to allstudents by the teachers, since it does not require skilled people. The new test wasadministred to 1500 primary school students to obtain standard measures. Reliabilityof the new screening task was tested matching results with performances of thesame subjects on two standardized reading test. This study allows us to define thethreshold values in the variables used in the new screening procedure and to discussthevalidity of the threshold values currently used in the variables of the benchmarktests.