Relations Between Component Reading Skills, Inferences, and Comprehension Performance in Community College Readers

ABSTRACT

This study was conducted to understand the reading challenges of underprepared college students. A sample of the participants was enrolled in supplemental literacy programs because they were deemed not ready for reading and writing in college. Community college participants completed a series of measures that assessed foundational skills for reading, bridging and elaborative inferences processes, a comprehension measure that reflected close comprehension of a text, and a scenario-based assessment that involved problem-solving with texts. Results suggest that bridging inferences were predictive of performance on measures of close comprehension, whereas elaborative inferences were predictive of performance on the scenario-based assessment. In terms of enrollment in supplemental literacy programs, variability in foundational skills and inferencing did not differ as a function of enrollment in these programs. However, underprepared students in this sample had greater difficulty engaging in complex literacy tasks that involved the application of information when compared to better-prepared students.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Data were collected as part of an ongoing study investigating factors that contribute to successful academic literacy. Access to the institutional data used to place students in supplemental literacy programs (i.e., mandatory Accuplacer tests scores) was not granted.

2. Results using listwise deletion for RQ2 and RQ3 (n = 245, 154 for SARA Comp and GISA, respectively) revealed the same pattern and significance of results, except that word recognition and decoding was significant (p = .03) rather than marginal.

Additional information

Funding

The present research was supported by grants awarded to the second author by the Institute of Education Sciences (R305F100005 and R305A190522), U.S. Department of Education (R305A150193 and R305A19006). All opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and not the funding agencies. None of the authors has a financial stake in the publication of this research, and therefore there are no perceived conflicts of interest.