engleski

Cognitive profiles of different categories of students with reading difficulties

Text comprehension is a complex task and many skills may contribute to a child’ s reading comprehension level. Lower order processes refer to the level of letter and word recognition, whereas higher order processes refer to comprehension of the content of text. Young children’ s reading comprehension is strongly predicted by lower level language skills, such as word reading accuracy, and verbal and semantic skills. The aim of this study was to establish categories of readers that differ in their reading skill, and to differentiate categories of reading difficulties regarding to component cognitive skills. Participants were 303 second-grade children from five elementary schools in Rijeka, Croatia. In addition to the measures of decoding, reading fluency and reading comprehension, the measures of cognitive skills and processes relevant for reading (visual-motor discrimination, phonological awareness, vocabulary and short-term memory) were applied. Cluster analysis showed three different categories of readers: (1) good readers (56 %) who read fluently and accurate with good comprehension ; (2) accurate, but non-fluent readers with low comprehension (34 %) ; and (3) poor readers (10 %) with low results in all three aspects of reading. These results confirm that reading accuracy and reading fluency are prerequisites for good comprehension. The good readers were significantly better in all cognitive component skills than the two groups of poor comprehenders. Another cluster analyses were made to define cognitive profiles of these two groups of poor comprehenders. The both groups of poor comprehenders consist of different subgroups that differ in their cognitive deficits. These results showed that children with reading difficulties are heterogeneous group.

text comprehension; reading difficulties; cognitive profile

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