Domain Structure of Reading Literacy: Latent Class Modeling of IEA Data

The latent structure of the reading test of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) Reading Literacy study was investigated. The use of latent class modeling for investigating the measurement properties of a large-scale reading assessment database is demonstrated. The study focused on response data from the United States, Canada, Hong Kong, and Denmark, for a total sample of 15,304 nine-year-olds. One of the main research questions was whether the type of text (narrative, expository, and documents) elicits different types of reading comprehension. Findings indicate that there is no empirical evidence of three separate text types for any of the four countries, but there is empirical evidence of two separate reading domains. One latent variable represents a general reading domain associated with all three text types, and the other represents a prose reading domain associated only with expository and narrative text types. The latent class modeling approach provides a way to examine the latent structure of the IEA reading test that avoids many problems that may occur when applying factor-analytic methodology. (Contains 3 figures, 12 tables, and 30 references.) (SLD)