Project team: Emma James, Kate Nation, Paul Thompson, Lucy Bowes
In this project, we are interested in understanding why some children struggle with reading comprehension. Reading comprehension is a complex skill that draws upon many aspects of language and cognition: once we have successfully read a word from the page, we need to understand what it means, integrate it within the context of the sentence, update our understanding of the text we are reading, and hold all of this in mind as we progress onward. There may be many different reasons, then, why different children find comprehension difficult. To get at this question, we need to measure those abilities in very large numbers of children, and assess at the broader context in which different strengths and weaknesses occur.
Fortunately, we don’t need to collect all that data ourselves. Funded by a Secondary Data Analysis Initiative Award from the ESRC, we used data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children ( ALSPAC). ALSPAC recruited pregnant mothers into the study in the early 1990s, and continues to follow their offspring as they now approach their 30th birthday. We looked at the language and cognitive abilities of ~7000 children who completed a reading assessment at age 9 years in an attempt to understand some of the heterogeneity in reading comprehension difficulties. Having idnetified over 900 children with comprehension weaknesses at age 9, we then looked forwards in time to capture later education and employment outcomes, and backwards in time to capture early risk factors associated with later reading comprehension difficulties. Finally, examined whether comprehension difficulties might be associated with broader social and emotional problems, as is the case for other types of reading and language difficulty.
We took an open science approach to this project. We prepared two Registered Reports and where this wasn't possible, we wrote detailed pre-registrations in advance of data analysis. Our project has been recognised by an Open Research Award.
In this podcast, Emma James talks about the findings from our first paper published from this this project. This used latent class analysis and a data-driven approach to identify children with relative comprehension weaknesses in mid-childhood.
Having identified this group of children, our second paper tracked performance through secondary school and beyond. The Stage 2 Registered Report will soon be published in the Journal of Educational Psychology. In the meantime, you can access the pre-print here.
