Relationships between Word Identification Skills and Reading Comprehension of Elementary School Children.

Three studies were conducted as part of a series designed to identify the subskills of word identification that correlate most highly with reading comprehension and to examine various methods of assessing these subskills. In the first study, the prototype of a decoding (word identification) test was administered to 282 first, third, and fifth grade students, along with The Reading Subtest of the Metropolitan Achievement Tests (Form F). Study Two tested 792 second, fourth, and sixth grade students with a revised version of the decoding test and the Reading Subtest of the MAT. After another revision of the decoding test, the same procedures were used in Study Three to test 360 second, fourth, and sixth grade students. Results from the three studies indicated that all three broad areas of word identification--phonics, structural analysis, and contextual analysis--are significantly related to comprehension. The contextual analysis subtests in each study achieved higher correlation overall with the comprehension measure than did the structure and phonics subtests. Changes in the subtests between Studies Two and Three generally resulted in higher reliability ratings for those subtests that were extensively revised. The revision of subtests, however, made comparisons of results across the three studies inappropriate, and accounts for the considerable variation of correlations between skill subtests and global comprehension measures. (Author/RL)