Preventing Reading Difficulties
in Young Children
Catherine E. Snow, M. Susan Burns, and Peg Griffin, Editors
Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children, National Research Council
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TABLE 4-1 Prediction of Reading Difficulties at School Entry

Factors Identified in the Child Number of Samples Strength of Relationship
Language
Verbal memory for stories/sentences 11 Median r = .49
  mean r = .45 (SD = .14)

Lexical skills
  1. Receptive vocabulary 20 Median r = .33
  mean r = .36 (SD = .17)
  2. Confrontation naming 5 Median r = .49
  mean r = .45 (SD = .07)
  3. Rapid serial naming 14 Median r = .40
  mean r = .38 (SD = .09)
Receptive language, syntax/morphology 9 Median r = .38
  mean r = .37 (SD = na)
Expressive language 11 Median r = .37
  mean r = .32 (SD = .16)
Overall language 4 Median r = .47
  mean r = .46 (SD = .15)
Phonological awareness 27 Median r = .42
  mean r = .46 (SD = .13)

Early Literacy-Related Skills
Reading "readiness" 21 Median r = .56
  mean r = .57 (SD = .12)
Letter identification 24 Median r = .53
  mean r = .52 (SD = .14)
Concepts of print 7 Median r = .49
  mean r = .46 (SD = .20)

NOTE: Only studies with sample sizes of 30 or more were considered. At least one of the risk factors of interest had to be assessed initially when the children were within about one year of beginning formal schooling in reading, and at least one assessment of reading skills had to be obtained after one, two, or occasionally three years of instruction. If a word recognition measure was used in a prediction study, its correlation(s) with predictors was used; otherwise, a composite reading score or, rarely, a reading comprehension measure was instead accepted as the criterion variable. When more than one correlation value per risk factor was available in a given sample of children (because multiple reading assessments were conducted and/or because multiple measures of the predictor were used), the average correlation for the sample was used for aggregation. To obtain the average correlations across samples, therefore, each contributing sample contributed only one independent observation. SOURCE: adapted from Scarborough (1998).

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