Correlations among reading and reading-related measures were much lower than expected, indicating poor integration of skills in struggling adult readers¶
Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causalr2·q3
Currency · newest study 2011 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person · overdue for a recheck since 2016: baselines and conditions change
Subclaims¶
Reading the evidence codes
q is the design tier, i the impact, n the sample, and the kind with its r
the rigour judged within that kind: what each code means.
This claim: no standardized effect is recorded in observations/ for it yet, so no benchmark reading is possible.
q3 i? Although most correlations among reading-related measures were statistically significant, the majority were small (64% at pretest and 55% at posttest at or below .30), far below the r > .60 expected among typically developing child readers. → Greenberg Daphne 2011
Evidence¶
Greenberg Daphne 2011¶
Greenberg Daphne, Wise Justin, Morris Robin, Fredrick Laura, Nanda Alice O., Pae Hye-K. (2011). A randomized control study of instructional approaches for struggling adult readers. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3237050/
q3 · i? · causal · r2
Pearson correlations were conducted within and across time points among the study's language and reading measures. At pretest only two coefficients exceeded .60 (WJ Word Attack with TOWRE Phonemic Decoding Efficiency, r = .71; TOWRE Sight Word Efficiency with GORT Fluency, r = .66); at posttest only four did.
"More importantly, however, the majority of the correlation coefficients (64%) were at or below .30; a level that represents small relationships."
Discussion¶
Related Claims¶
- Struggling adult readers made significant reading gains across all instructional groups, but all improvements were associated with small effect sizes — related
- Below Basic adults read far fewer words per minute than higher-level readers, with 49% reading at 60 wcpm or slower — related
- Participants entered the study with very poor skills, at least 1 SD below the mean on every measure and 2 SD below on receptive vocabulary, phonological awareness, and fluency — related
- Real word decoding relates more strongly to adult reading comprehension (r = .52) than pseudoword decoding (r = .42), though not significantly — related
- Expressive vocabulary adds small but significant variance to exception word reading, but not to general or nonword reading, in adult struggling readers — related
- Expressive vocabulary uniquely explains variance in reading comprehension of adult struggling readers — related
Page metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
type |
claim |
id |
poor-integration-low-correlations-adult-readers |
title |
Correlations among reading and reading-related measures were much lower than expected, indicating poor integration of skills in struggling adult readers |
description |
Correlations among reading and reading-related measures were much lower than expected, indicating poor integration of skills in struggling adult readers |
status |
review |
evidence_strength |
moderate |
newest_evidence |
2011 |
recheck_by |
2016 |
generated |
by process:wiki-ingest on 2026-10-17 |
trust |
unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content |
sources |
1 — greenberg-daphne-2011 |
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