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

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the contribution of decoding and reading fluency on reading comprehension and how it differs across different types of comprehension measures among fourth-grade students with reading difficulties and disabilities ( age = 9.8, = 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 Gates-MacGinitie Reading Comprehension 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 subtest. 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.