Addressing reading comprehension in elementary-school readers: How do decoding and oral language skills predict performance on two measures, and are the same students identified as having a comprehension difficulty?
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Date
2021-09
Authors
Campbell, Sarah
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Publisher
Mount Saint Vincent University
Abstract
Reading Comprehension draws on multiple skills and knowledge but is frequently assessed as if it were a single skill. There are questions about the validity and differences between measures, with few studies addressing these issues directly. In first through third-grade students, pseudoword decoding accounted for similar amounts of variance in two measures of reading comprehension, while oral language skills contributed more to a multiple-choice test than to a cloze test. The prediction by each oral language skill was similar across grades, except for syntactic awareness which predicted more variance in cloze test scores with each increasing grade. Of students identified as below the 16th and 25th percentile by the multiple-choice test, 34.2% and 36.9% were not identified by the cloze test. This highlights inconsistencies between who is identified between these two measures. Based on these results and previous findings, I propose a change in the assessment of reading comprehension.
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Keywords
Reading comprehension , Oral language , Decoding , Education , Early elementary , Assessment