mprehension. He cites the interconnection of psychological and world-experience factors on one side and the instruments of quantitative measurement on the other in scoring reading "calibration," suggesting that the instruments used to measure reading comprehension can skew test results up or down.
If the poor reader is an adult, the reason for lack of reading comprehension may be a specific but long-undiagnosed disorder such as dyslexia. To uncover this disorder in adulthood appears to create a specific problem set that entails not only the technical aspects of reading-ability assessment but also psychological factors that might not be present in a child with limited reading skills. It would seem that trying to assess the presence of a learning disability such as dyslexia by means of a discrepancy between IQ and composite reading score would not be fruitful and might be psychologically destructive, particularly given the highly charged debate over the degree to which cultural factors inform intelligence-test results. In any case, whatever the benefits of this controversial technique (Lerner, p. 399), it seems more suited to the captive-audience nature of a classroom or educational laboratory than to the project of addressing the needs of an otherwise functioning adult. On the other hand, it might be useful to evaluate cognitive abilities of the reader. Cognitive factors associated with diagnostic situations are important to Beck. To be sure, Beck is mainly concerned with psychological problems. But the point is that his caution to practitioners to look carefully at interpersonal factors of the clinical setting (Beck, 1976) seems useful. A realization of reading problems could be related to negative self-image. Therefore, what this comes down to is a need for sensitivity on the part of any practitioner to the psychological importance (especially anxiety levels) that the poor reader may be experiencing in regard to reading.
Assuming...