Date

4-2012

Department

School of Education

Degree

Doctor of Education (EdD)

Chair

Lucinda Spaulding, Jill Jones

Primary Subject Area

Education, General; Education, Reading; Education, Secondary; Education, Sociology of; Sociology, Criminology and Penology; Education, Tests and Measurements

Keywords

Adolescent, At-risk, Comprehension, Fluency, Incarcerated, Reading

Disciplines

Criminology | Education | Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research | Liberal Studies | Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies | Sociology

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine which of the three reading fluency subskills were most strongly correlated with reading comprehension in adolescent at-risk readers. The participants were 82 adolescent males (ages 13-19) who had been committed to a juvenile detention facility. Archival data from a two-year period was collected from a maximum security juvenile detention facility in a rural section of the Northeastern United States. The Measures of Academic Progress test was used to collect reading comprehension data; the Qualitative Reading Inventory-4 test was used to collect reading speed and reading accuracy data; the Multidimensional Fluency Scale was used to collect reading prosody data. The data was analyzed using a bivariate correlation analysis in order to measure the strength of the correlations. The research revealed that the relationship between reading speed and reading comprehension had an identical correlation coefficient as the relationship between reading prosody and reading comprehension; both correlations were significant and strong. The research also revealed that reading accuracy and reading comprehension were only weakly correlated.

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