The Contributions of Reading Fluency and Decoding to Reading Comprehension for Struggling Readers in Fourth Grade

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the contribution of decoding and reading fluency to reading comprehension and how it differs across different types of comprehension measures among 4th-grade students with reading difficulties and disabilities (M age = 9.8, SD = 0.6). Results indicated that decoding and reading fluency predicted 8.1% to 43.3% of the variance in reading comprehension. Decoding and reading fluency accounted for 8.1% of the variance associated with performance on the Comprehension subtest of the Gates–MacGinitie Reading Test, 22.5% for the Test of Silent Reading Efficiency and Comprehension (TOSREC), and 43.3% for the Woodcock–Johnson III Passage Comprehension subtest (WJ3–PC). Decoding explained −0.2% of the variance for the Gates–MacGinitie, 3.1% for the TOSREC, and 15.1% for the WJ3–PC. Reading fluency individually accounted for 3.9% of the variance for the Gates–MacGinitie, 4.5% for the TOSREC, and 1.9% for the WJ3–PC. We discuss the limitations and practical implications of these findings.

Additional information

Funding

Data for this study was obtained from an existing database, from a project titled “Response to Early Reading Intervention and the Identification of Learning Disabilities,” conducted by the Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk. This research was supported by Grant P50 HD052117-07 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.