Design and Validation of a Rapid Visual Processing Measure for Screening Reading Difficulties in Early Childhood

Can individual differences in visual processing predict individual differences in reading abilities? The potential role of visual processing deficits in reading difficulties is a longstanding and unresolved question. A major challenge to address this question empirically is to develop reliable behavioral measures for developmental studies because most tasks are not equally reliable across different age groups and require iterative design changes to ensure that the measure reliably indexes the intended construct across the developmental span. In this study we show how to iteratively modify the behavioral task informed by data and the utilization of item response theory to further reduce task redundancies that make the measure reliable, fast, fun and easily deployable to a diverse population of kindergarten and first grade children. Our results show that the ability to rapidly encode visual information - a string of letters or symbols - reliably correlates with reading outcomes at the end of the academic year in a large and diverse sample of kindergarten, first and second grade children.