Growth in Reading Comprehension and Mathematics Achievement in Primary School: A Bivariate Transition Multilevel Growth Curve Model Approach

Submit Manuscript | http://medcraveonline.com Reading achievement in primary school contains two distinguishable components: word reading and reading comprehension. Reading comprehension is a complex process and requires not only the fluent decoding of words but also understanding vocabulary, making inferences and relating the ideas to prior knowledge. Reading comprehension in primary schools stretches from the understanding of the meaning of words to the meaning of a short text and this is highly dependent on age. Many researchers have argued that true measurement of reading comprehension skills can only be obtained at later stages of primary school say from the third grade on (7 or 8 years old) [68]. This paper focuses on reading comprehension which requires more advanced cognitive and linguistic skills. For this reason pupils were only tested from the end of grade 3 on. While studies have shown that individual differences in reading comprehension in particular during primary school are stable [9], differences between schools [10] however have not been addressed in depth. It might also be interesting to find out if this stability mentioned by (De Jong and Van Der Leij [9]) remains when considered in conjunction with mathematics.