Mediational effect of basic and intermediate reading skills on the relationship between first year Compulsory Secondary Education students’ comprehension and academic performance

Abstract

The study of the skills for access to knowledge is nowadays a recurrent scientific topic due to their role as promoters of social mobility. Within this framework, procedural knowledge that unfolds during the reading comprehension process constitutes cognitive factors that determine the ability to learn from texts, and therefore could constitute predictors of academic achievement. The paper presents the results of a research with students from 1^st grade of high school in Catalonia (Spain) (n=196), that explores simple mediational models in search of the indirect effect that basic and intermediate skills have on the prediction of changes in their school results, through comprehension. It is found that part of that total effect are based on the skills underlying reading fluency, it does occasionally on the lexical skills displayed during word identification and never on the domain of the alphabetic principle. In general, these results are discussed with studies that have related reading and school outcomes variables and, specifically, they are contrasted with previous investigations that do not report the presence of indirect effect. The findings open the way for scientific testing about the empirical effect of teaching strategies focused on lexical reinforcement and functional fluency in the quality of comprehension and, consequently, in academic outcomes as empirical values of school learning.

Keywords: Comprehension, Reading fluency, Lexical and sub-lexical skills, Mediation analysis, Academic achievement