Modeling Longitudinal Reading Comprehension in Adolescence: Protective and Risk Factors

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Project Summary/Abstract Today's high school students are required to understand and synthesize information from increasingly complex, diverse texts. These advanced reading comprehension demands are reflected in current educational standards, such as the Common Core State Standards, and in the English Language Arts curricula adopted by high schools. Students are expected to `integrate and interpret' and to `reflect and evaluate' information across text types, content areas, and presentation media. The problem is that we do not have empirically validated theoretical models that reflect the text and task complexities encountered by high school students. Further, extant models do not provide an explanatory framework for the advantage for monolingual over bilingual or female over male students. This lack of evidenced-based models of the structure of reading comprehension constitutes a critical gap in reading science that limits our ability to address the well-documented reading deficits of high school students in the U.S. A second critical gap is the lack of comprehensive predictor models that go beyond the simple view of reading (SVR) and consider additional cognitive influences on reading comprehension, such as executive function, as well as psychological and ecological factors, such as motivation and the school environment, which may become more influential as they consolidate or change during adolescence. A third critical gap is the lack of longitudinal studies from middle to high school that can identify unique factors operating over time that may protect adolescents from, or place them at higher risk of, poor reading comprehension. These may differ in their strength of influence from those affecting reading comprehension in elementary school students. Our project - Modelling Longitudinal Reading Comprehension in Adolescence: Protective and Risk Factors - brings together multidisciplinary researchers to address these knowledge gaps and advance understanding of reading comprehension in high- school students. Our principal goals are to determine the structure of reading comprehension in 11th grade, clarify key predictors of reading comprehension within and across adolescence, and to identify protective and risk factors for good and poor reading comprehension. We build on our research conducted as the Language and Reading Research Consortium (LARRC) and the Monolingual and Bilingual Reading Comprehension (MBRC) project. This is a unique opportunity to continue our LARRC longitudinal study of students who entered preschool as monolingual English speakers or as Spanish-English bilingual speakers. These two longitudinal groups are now in 9th grade. Additional longitudinal participants from MBRC (monolingual, bilingual) assessed in 6th grade will continue in 9th and 11th grades. We will assess these four longitudinal samples in 11th grade, and a new cross-sectional sample of 11th graders.