Survey prevalence of specific reading disabilities among public primary school students in the city of Arak

Background and objectivesReading is one of the most important academic abilities and the purpose of this study was to determine the prevalence of specific reading disabilities among public primary school students in a central iranian city.MethodsA cross-sectional multi-staged stratified randomized cluster sampling study was conducted among 2135 students from firth to the sixth grade of public primary school students in Arak.The students with normal intelligence, intact auditory and visual senses, and no history of brain injury, were assessed by screening inventory reading test with reliability of ./77 by Cronbach s alpha. If the student read less than 90% of words correctly and his/her reading comprehension score were less than 50%, he/she was located in the level of specific reading disability.ResultsOverall, the prevalence of specific reading disability was 9/9%. Increasing of student s grade didn’t have significant effect on the prevalence of this disability. 10/6% of boys and 9/1% of girls had specific reading disability that this difference was not statistically significant.ConclusionsThe uniquing of this study was its large sample size and also was done in in all of schools in the city of Arak. prevalence of this disability in this research is similar to such conducted research in another city in iran(Isfahan), but its degree differs from many other researches. The rate among male students is slightly higher than the rate among female students.

Keywords:

Prevalence , reading disability , student