Motivation
Does believing you can read well predict reading skill?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Children who were more confident in their reading ability were better at reading words aloud, even after accounting for their memory, vocabulary and sound-awareness skills, but their confidence did not predict how well they understood what they read.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Class-administered self-efficacy questionnaire plus group and individual reading and cognitive tests in one term; hierarchical regressions run separately by gender with self-efficacy entered last.
- N
- N=175 · 86 boys and 93 girls in Years 4-6 were tested; four children with extreme low self-efficacy scores were excluded, leaving the analysed sample.
- Population
- Children in Years 4, 5 and 6 at two phonics-teaching primary schools in central England, mostly white middle-class, English as first language
- Outcome
- Word reading efficiency (TOWRE words and nonwords) and sentence-completion reading comprehension (shortened Vernon-Warden)
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Key findings
Reading self-efficacy correlated with word reading but not with comprehension. After controlling for school, age and cognitive skills, self-efficacy remained a small but significant predictor of word reading for both girls and boys, alongside working memory and phonological awareness. It did not predict comprehension. Boys and girls had similar self-efficacy levels and the self-efficacy-reading link did not differ by gender, and older children reported slightly higher self-efficacy.
Methodology
The researchers developed a questionnaire asking children how sure they were that they could carry out a series of reading tasks of increasing difficulty, rated from 1 to 7. They gave it to 86 boys and 93 girls in Years 4 to 6 at two English primary schools, along with a timed test of reading real and made-up words, a sentence-completion comprehension test, and tests of working memory, short-term memory, vocabulary and phonological awareness. Regressions entered school, age and the cognitive skills first, then self-efficacy last, separately for boys and girls.
Limitations
Because everything was measured at one point, the study cannot tell whether confidence improves reading or whether good readers simply know they are good; the authors expect the relationship runs both ways. The comprehension test had only adequate reliability and, unusually, was not predicted by vocabulary, so the null comprehension result may reflect a weak measure rather than a true absence of a link. The questionnaire was new and its items mostly concerned decoding-type activities, the schools were two phonics-teaching schools serving mainly white middle-class families, and the text does not report the size of the self-efficacy effects.
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