Literacy Pathway

Five to ten percent of primary school children fail to learn to read at the standard expected from their intelligence and educational and cultural background. This condition is known as dyslexia. In 2005-2006, a dyslexia project is being conducted in participating Southern Tasmanian schools. Past work has shown that some children with normal intelligence have reading problems because of problems with coordinating both eyes to read visual images. The project aims to screen for vision coordination problems among children with low literacy. It is not currently known what proportion of children who have difficulty reading have vision problems in relation to scanning text with both eyes working together. The main aim of the Literacy Pathways Project is: To assess how children may benefit from different programs to assist them with reading. Each program contains a mixture of activities that are based on past work indicating that they have benefited some children with reading problems. The relative importance of the different components within or between the programs is currently not known and is the subject of the educational trial. Participants are unaware of the intervention status and commercial names of the reading programs in the study. The programs are referred to as the orange, yellow or green program. Participants are not aware of the content of the other programs. The people conducting the assessments are blind to intervention status. Analysis - The true group allocation will be removed for the analysis and only added back in at the end. That is, the analyst will only analyse the data being aware of the orange, yellow or green categories but not the intervention status associated with each.