A C Kooijman¹, J G M van den Hoek¹, I E Ekkens², E Vervaart²
¹University of Groningen, Laboratory of Experimental Ophthalmology, Groningen, The Netherlands; ²Visio, Royal Institute for the Education of Partially Sighted and Blind Children, Huizen, The Netherlands
Background. Earlier we designed the LEO reading chart; a set of M-unit reading charts. These reading charts are less suited to assess reading speed in children. Therefore we developed a set of M-unit reading charts with text appropriate for reading of primary school children. Method. We designed text blocks of four lines with increasingly complex words. The first line consists of seven simple words, and the fourth line contains five more complex words. Most simple words consist of four characters; complex words are made up by 4-11 characters. The words are taken of a validated reading test for primary school children. Children are invited to read all words, but are stopped at the difficulty level where they slow down. First we tested reading speed of 30 text blocks in 53 normally seeing children of the primary school (age 6-12). All text was printed at 2.5M. Secondly we made a set of nine reading charts with text blocks printed at character sizes from 0.5M up to 10M in 0.1 log units steps. These reading charts were used to assess reading speed in 14 visually impaired children with normal learning capacity.
Results. Reading speed of the normally seeing children changed from 45 to 104 words per minute and was normalised for each child. We selected 20 text blocks, which were read at a mean normalised speed varying less than +/- 5%. Reading speed in the visually impaired children ranged from 24 to 113 words per minute and we could show that relative reading speed of text blocks varied with a standard deviation of 7%. Reading speed at character sizes above the critical character size remained constant, but could vary in an individual child by +/- 10 %.
Conclusion. The use of words with increasing complexity enabled to use the charts for starting readers as well as more experienced readers. The set of charts, given the girl's name LEOntientje, can be used at all reading levels in elementary school groups 3 to 8 to assess critical character size.
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