Reading
Does reading speed still matter for school grades after primary school?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
How quickly and accurately children read aloud predicted their grades in text-heavy subjects even after accounting for how well they understood what they read, though the extra contribution was small.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Single-time-point individual reading tests with year-end school marks; hierarchical regression (comprehension first, fluency second), bootstrap mediation and moderation by school level.
- N
- N=489 · 489 students in grades 4, 5, 6, 8 and 9; Technology grades available only for the 234 secondary and high school students.
- Population
- Italian-born students without a certified learning disability, from primary, lower secondary and high schools in a mid-sized city in Central Italy
- Outcome
- End-of-year teacher-assigned marks (0-10) in each school subject, predicted by reading rapidity (syllables per second), reading accuracy (errors) and comprehension
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Key findings
Comprehension predicted marks in every subject. Fluency added a small further share of explained variance (an R-squared change of .03 to .06) for Italian, English, History, Geography, Mathematics and Sciences, but not for Technology, Music, Art or Physical Education. Comprehension's link to grades was mostly direct rather than passing through fluency. Reading speed mattered for several subjects in primary and high school but generally not in lower secondary school, and these school-level differences explained only 1% to 5% of variance.
Methodology
The researchers tested 489 Italian students in grades 4 to 9 who had no diagnosed learning disability. Each student read a grade-appropriate passage aloud, giving a speed score (syllables per second) and an accuracy score (words misread), and completed a standardised multiple-choice comprehension test. Their end-of-year marks in every subject were collected from school reports, and regressions tested whether fluency added to comprehension in predicting marks, whether fluency mediated comprehension's effect, and whether the pattern differed by school level.
Limitations
All measures come from one time point in one Italian city, so the study cannot show that improving fluency would raise grades; the authors acknowledge that longitudinal data are needed for mediation claims. Plausible third variables such as verbal ability, study skills, motivation and general intelligence were not measured, so fluency may partly stand in for them. The unique contribution of fluency is modest, grades are teacher-assigned and not standardised across schools, prosody (reading with expression) was not assessed, and results from a consistent orthography like Italian may not transfer to English.
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