Initial validation of a measure of decoding difficulty as a unique predictor of miscues and passage reading fluency

AbstractQuantifying the decoding difficulty (i.e., ‘decodability’) of text is important for accurately matching young readers to appropriate text and scaffolding reading development. Since no easily accessible, quantitative, word-level metric of decodability exists, we developed a decoding measure (DM) that can be calculated via a web-based sco ring application that takes into account sub-lexical components (e.g. orthographic complexity), thus measuring decodability at the grapheme-phoneme level, which can be used to judge decodability of individual words or passages. Here we report three experiments using the DM: two predicting children’ s word-level errors and one predicting passage reading fluency. Generalized linear mixed effect models showed that metrics from the DM explained unique variance in children’s oral reading miscues after controlling for word frequency in two samples of children (experiments 1 and 2), and that more e rrors were made on words with higher DM scores for poor readers. Furthermore, the DM metrics predicted children’s number of words read correctly per minute after accounting for estimated Lexile passage scores in a third sample (experiment 3). These results show that after controlling for word freq uency (experiments 1 and 2) and estimated Lexile scores (experiment 3) the model including the DM metrics was significantly better in predicting children’s word reading fluency both for individual words and passages. While further refinement ...
Source: Reading and Writing - Category: Child Development Source Type: research