What Is the Reading Component Skill Profile of Adolescent Struggling Readers in Urban Schools?

The purpose of this descriptive study was to examine the component reading skills of adolescent struggling readers attending urban high schools. Specifically, 11 measures of reading skills were administered to 345 adolescent readers to gain a research-based perspective on the reading skill profile of this population. Participants were assessed in the domains of word level, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Analysis of the results found that 61% of the struggling adolescent readers had significant deficits in all of the reading components listed above. Subgroups of struggling readers showed similar but more severe patterns. For example, students with learning disabilities scored significantly below the levels of the struggling reader group at large. In contrast, most proficient readers scored high on all measures of reading with above-average component reading skills in word level, vocabulary, and comprehension. The lowest skill area for the proficient reader group was fluency, where they scored at the average level. Implications for policy and instructional programming are discussed.