Assessing the Reliability and Dimensionality of Experimental Morphological Awareness Measures with Struggling Adult Readers

项目摘要 据估计，美国有3600万成年人在基本识字方面苦苦挣扎 skills.缺乏识字技能会产生代价高昂的社会、经济和个人影响（例如， 犯罪率和失业率较高;健康和计算机知识技能较低）。然而，有一个 缺乏严谨的研究来了解这些成年人潜在的阅读过程， 在成人扫盲中过度依赖为儿童制定的阅读模式和评估 程序.最近的证据表明，形态意识（MA），一种理解 最小的意义单位（即，前缀），是阅读的重要贡献者 阅读理解（RC）能力的挣扎成人读者。MA仍然是唯一预测 从阅读的简单观点（SVR）看RC对突出成分技能的控制 框架，包括解码和口语词汇。然而，MA已被评估为 挣扎的成人和儿童读者使用几个实验措施。最近与 挣扎的成年读者和青少年读者已经评估了 MA结构，对于MA的哪些方面有助于 多维性对青少年的新研究表明，MA最好是作为一种 一般因素（整合不同MA措施之间共享方差的重叠）以及 特定因素（由任务、项目和人员特定方面说明的独特差异， MA）。此外，一般MA因素与特殊因素之间存在差异 与RC的关系鉴于MA对挣扎中的成年人的RC技能的重要性， 读者，这些研究结果表明，需要更好地了解MA的结构效度， 制定更好和更敏感的千年评估措施，并将千年评估置于更大的区域合作模型中。 因此，该项目的目标是双重的：a。研究MA的心理测量学特性 测量和维度的MA结构，以完善和创建一个新的MA电池 对于挣扎的成年读者;和B.要将MA集成到SVR框架中，请检查其 与RC的关系，并比较MA和已知之间的关系是否与RC相关 技能较高的（大学生）和技能较低的、苦苦挣扎的成年人之间的差距是相等的。 读者儿童文献中的荟萃分析表明，MA干预措施 词汇、解码和RC技能。对挣扎中的成年读者的干预工作 主要集中在解码，发音和流畅性，并产生最小或没有收益。因此，在本发明中， 必须建立有效的评估来探索额外的、可延展的技能（即，MA）， 未来的干预工作与此人口。

PROJECT SUMMARY It is estimated that 36 million adults in the United States struggle with basic literacy skills. Deficient literacy skills have costly societal, economic, and individual implications (e.g., higher crime and unemployment rates; lower health and computer literacy skills). Yet, there is a paucity of rigorous research to understand these adults' underlying reading processes and an over-reliance on reading models and assessments developed for children in adult literacy programs. Recent evidence suggests that morphological awareness (MA), an understanding of the smallest units of meaning (i.e., prefixes), is an important contributor to the reading comprehension (RC) skills of struggling adult readers. MA remains uniquely predictive of RC controlling for prominent component skills from the Simple View of Reading (SVR) framework, including decoding and oral vocabulary. However, MA has been assessed for struggling adult and child readers using several experimental measures. Recent work with struggling adult readers and adolescent readers has assessed the dimensionality of the MA construct, with a lack of consensus as to what aspects of MA contribute to the multidimensionality. Emerging work with adolescents suggests that MA is best represented as a general factor (integrating overlap in shared variance among different MA measures) as well as specific factors (unique variance accounted for by task-, item-and person-specific aspects of MA). In addition, the general MA factor and the specific factors have exhibited differential relations with RC. Given the noted importance of MA to the RC skills of struggling adult readers, these findings suggest the need to better understand the construct validity of MA to develop better and more sensitive MA measures and to place MA in a larger model of RC. Thus, the aims of this project are twofold: a. to examine the psychometric properties of MA measures and dimensionality of the MA construct in order to refine and create a new MA battery for struggling adult readers; and b. to integrate MA within the SVR framework, examine its relations to RC, and to compare whether the relations among MA and known correlates to RC are equivalent between more-skilled (college students) and less-skilled, struggling adult readers. Meta-analyses in the children's literature suggest that MA interventions build vocabulary, decoding, and RC skills. Intervention work with struggling adult readers has focused primarily on decoding, phonics, and fluency, and produced minimal to no gains. Thus, it is imperative to build valid assessments to explore additional, malleable skills (i.e., MA) for future intervention work with this population.