The efficacy of PASS as a theoretical guide for identifying cognitive processes related to academic achievement and learning disabilities [17, 18] has been demonstrated. The results of the present study provide support to PASS theory as an interactional model of cognitive processes that can discriminate between children with reading disability and average readers. Additionally, Planning, Attention, Successive, and Simultaneous processing skills have been found in capable readers and deficient in students with reading disabilities. The results of the present study provide support to the PASS, Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, and Successive, cognitive processes as being deficient in children with reading disability and well developed in average readers [19].
Our study showed that there was a statistically significant difference in the performance in CAS battery between children with reading disability and controls in almost all domains (Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, and Successive processes). Differences between children with reading disability and control participants were supported by some findings from the literature.
Kirby et al. [18] demonstrated how the PASS model of cognition can be applied to the understanding of cognitive processing differences between students with reading disabilities and typically achieving students. Sixty elementary-age children were administered subtests from the DN: CAS and select subtests from the Woodcock-Johnson Test of Achievement.
Early studies found that reading was significantly related to both successive and simultaneous processes (i.e., the integration of the reading stimuli in either a sequential or simultaneous manner) [20,21,22]. Simultaneous and successive processing tasks have correlated significantly with measures of reading comprehension [23,24,25,26] and reading decoding [27]. These findings suggest that high reading achievement necessitates adequate skill development in both simultaneous and successive processing.
Planning and attention have also been shown to correlate significantly with reading [28]. Planning has been related to reading decoding and reading comprehension in studies with elementary school-aged students and was reported to become more highly correlated with reading achievement as students matured [17, 29]. Ramey’s study with high school students also supported the importance of planning with a variety of reading tasks.
Components of the PASS theory can aid in understanding a child’s skill at reading. For example, it has been argued that the planning function allows the child, when reading a word, to use alternative strategies and then to monitor and evaluate those strategies. The attentional function maintains an optimal level of arousal necessary for a child to discriminate among stimuli, focus and direct behavior, and activate the planning and coding cognitive processes. The successive cognitive process keeps every piece of information in its correct order, whereas the simultaneous process combines pieces of information to produce a single or integrated code. It has been suggested that simultaneous processing is involved in holistic word recognition and successive processing in the phonic analysis of a word [30, 31].
Finally, the good readers showed solid performance on all tasks, suggesting intact planning, attention, simultaneous, and successive processes, while the reading disability group demonstrated deficits in their planning, attention, simultaneous, and successive processes; this type of cognitive profiling could provide psychologists with a functional analysis of cognitive strength and weakness, and information about potential overlap of cognitive processing deficits in reading disability and areas of need can then be better defined and targeted for special educational programming; skills can be observed, measured, and potentially linked to improvements in curriculum-based achievement.