Early identification of students who are at risk for writing difficulties is an important first step in improving writing performance. First grade students (N = 150) were administered a set of early writing measures and reading measures in January. Sentence Writing Quality and Oral Reading Fluency demonstrated strong classification accuracy when a Teacher Rating was used to identify which students had writing difficulties (AUC >. 90), and the combined measures yielded sensitivity and specificity indices exceeding 0.90. The combined reading and writing measures yielded AUCs of a higher magnitude than those associated with individual measures when norm–referenced writing subtests were used to identify which students had writing difficulties (AUC in. 80 range). The findings suggest that it may be possible to accurately identify which students may be at risk for writing difficulties within first grade.
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