Neurocognitive profile of children with reading disability in Kannada

Background: The present study was based on the Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, and Successive processes (PASS) theory. Objectives: We hypothesized that there would be significant differences between children with and without reading disability (RD) on PASS components. Furthermore, we predicted that deficits in children with RD would not be uniform across PASS components. Patients and Methods: Children with RD who participated in the study were two grades below the expected reading level for their age but were otherwise normal with respect to intellectual functioning, opportunities, and instructions. The comparison group consisted of age-matched children. Results: Independent-samples t tests (two-tailed) showed significant difference between the groups on all the PASS component subtests. The PASS scores of children with RD were scattered unevenly around the average to well below the average range. Conclusions: Kannada children with RD were particularly poor on simultaneous and successive processing. Our results support the heterogeneity view of RD

Cognitive Assessment System (CAS): A review

This paper presents a review of literature of cognitive Assessment system (CAS) developed by J. P. Das and Jack A. Naglieri in1997 following their PASS theory (Planning, Attention, Successive & Simultaneous) based on Luria�s model of neuropsychological processing. CAS is a reliable measure of cognitive functioning which has proved its validity across cultures. CAS is acquiring professional status in assessment of multiple as well as specific neuropsychological processing over the past 27 years. The battery has also resulted in remedial tests such as PREP (PASS Remedial Enhancement Program). This paper traces the CAS through important research papers published in various international journals and books between 1983 and 2012

Effect of synthetic phonics instruction on literacy skills in an ESL setting

In the present study, the effectiveness of a synthetic phonics approach to teaching 10. year old Kannada-speaking children to read English was compared with a modified approach whereby the English letter sounds were also represented by the symbols used in Kannada, thus tapping into pre-existing graphophonological awareness skills. After 5-weeks of instruction, participants taught by the Kannada-mediated synthetic phonics approach performed significantly better on the reading, spelling, and graphophonological tasks than the group taught by synthetic phonics using only English letter-sound correspondences, who in turn performed better than the comparison group taught by the standard non-phonic classroom method. Applying the metalinguistic knowledge of the first language seems to have been beneficial in developing literacy skills in English