Reading difficulties and socio-emotional adjustment: internalizing patterns depend on age of identification
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Date
2016
Authors
Newman, Alyse
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Abstract
Children with reading difficulty experience stress in school and may develop negative socio-emotional adjustment. It is unclear what influences some students to experience externalizing patterns and others internalizing patterns. This study investigated the influence of the age of identification of reading difficulties on coping strategies and socio-emotional adjustment. 36 children (ages 9-12) from Winnipeg Schools and Child-Care centres completed measures of coping strategy and socio-emotional adjustment and their parents/guardians reported age of initial reading difficulty. Conditional processing analyses, using percentile bootstrapping, were used to examine mediating effects of coping strategies in the relationship between age-of-identification and socio-emotional adjustment. Results showed children who were identified with reading difficulties in Grade 2 or later were more likely to report using disengagement coping strategies but children identified with reading difficulties before Grade 2 were more likely to report higher internalizing patterns. Evidence for expected mediation by coping strategy was not found. These findings suggest that prolonged experience of reading difficulties is associated with greater risk of developing internalizing problems. Clarifying how age of identification of reading difficulty influences socio-emotional adjustment will help resolve theoretical debates and will help educators/clinicians to better serve students learning to read, and promote struggling readers’ healthy socio-emotional adjustment.
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Keywords
Reading, Difficulty, Socio-emotional, Internalizing