The purpose of this study was to investigate the contribution of decoding and reading fluency on reading comprehension and how it differs across different types of comprehension measures among fourth-grade students with reading difficulties and disabilities (Mean age = 9.8, SD = 0.6). Results indicated that decoding and reading fluency predicted 8.1% to 43.3% of the variance in reading comprehension. Decoding and reading fluency accounted for 8.1% of the variance associated with performance on the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Comprehension Test, 22.5% for the Test of Silent Reading Efficiency and Comprehension (TOSREC), and 43.3% for the Woodcock-Johnson III Passage Comprehension subtest (WJ3-PC). Decoding explained -0.2% of the variance for the Gates-MacGinitie, 3.1% for the TOSREC, and 15.1% for the WJ3-PC subtest. Reading fluency individually accounted for 3.9% of the variance for the Gates-MacGinitie, 4.5% for the TOSREC, and 1.9% for the WJ3-PC. We discuss the limitations and practical implications of these findings.
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