Intervention for Dyslexia - The British Dyslexia Association

Peer, 1998). A high overall level of accuracy was obtained in discriminant function
analysis, with false negative and false positive rates below 5%. In CoPS, dyslexic profiles
are typically those with relatively low scores on the subtests assessing phonological
awareness, verbal sequential memory and processing speed, although very young
children may also display difficulties on the Phoneme discrimination subtest. Because
CoPS provides norms for time as well as accuracy, it is possible to distinguish between
children whose overall rate of working is slow and those whose rate of working is slow in
certain areas but not others. Strengths (e.g. in visual memory) may be uncovered,
which can be used in teaching (see Singleton, 2002).
Table 11. Subtests in Lucid CoPS and LASS
Lucid CoPS
(ages 4–8 years)
LASS
(ages 7–11 and 11–15 years)
Visual spatial memory Visual spatial memory
Symbolic memory Verbal memory
Processing speed Phonological awareness
Visual sequential memory Phonological decoding
Associative memory Single word reading
Verbal sequential memory Sentence reading
Phonological awareness Spelling
Phoneme discrimination Non-verbal reasoning
Marks and Burden (2005) studied pupils in Devon schools who had been administered a
prototype of the CoPS program at age 5 as part of trials being carried out by the British
Dyslexia Association in 1996. (The version of CoPS used in this study was superseded by
the definitive Windows version of the program that underwent national standardisation
with over 2,500 children in 1997.) Sixty-six pupils were followed up, with correlations of
0.4–0.5 being found between CoPS test scores and results of National Curriculum
assessments in reading, writing and spelling given at age 7, although the authors
acknowledge the “questionable reliability” of National Curriculum assessment results.
These findings may be compared with correlations of around 0.6 obtained between
CoPS test scores at age 5 and standardised literacy tests at age 9, in the larger study
reported by Singleton, Thomas and Horne (2000). It should be pointed out that, in the
Devon trials, the children’s CoPS results were available to the teachers and follow-up
tuition was encouraged, with training provided for teachers in supporting dyslexic
children. This would have been expected to make a difference to the outcomes for the
pupils assessed and affect the predictive accuracy of the tests. In the Singleton et al.
(2000) study, the children’s CoPS results were not made available to the teachers.
Marks and Burden noted that the CoPS tests of visual spatial memory, symbolic memory,
processing speed and phonological awareness also correlated significantly with National
Curriculum assessments performance in maths, a finding replicated in a study by
Simmons, Singleton and Horne (2008). Marks and Burden suggest that the predictive
validity of CoPS tests may derive from a common factor, such as intelligence, although
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