The Relation Between Text Reading and Reading Comprehension Varies as a Function of Developmental Phase, Orthographic Depth, and Measurement Characteristics: Evidence From a Meta-Analysis.

We examined the relation between text reading fluency and reading comprehension, and moderators of the relation, including grade level, orthographic depth, and assessment task type (for text reading: text reading efficiency, accuracy, rate, sentence verification, maze; for reading comprehension: e.g., multiple-choice, oral retell, cloze), using a meta-analysis. Results from 401 studies (1,253 effect sizes; 266,880 participants) showed that across different types of text reading and reading comprehension tasks, text reading was strongly related with reading comprehension (r = .61, or .70 when correcting for measurement error) while text reading efficiency had a stronger relation (.65) than text reading accuracy (.59) or text reading rate (.54). Furthermore, the correlation differed by grade level and orthographic depth: .73 in primary grades, .69 in upper elementary grades, .59 in middle school, .54 in high school, and .44 for adults in deep orthographies, compared to .69 in primary grades, .52 in upper elementary grades, .42 in middle school, and .29 in high school in shallow orthographies. The maze and sentence verification tasks were more strongly related to measures of text reading than to reading comprehension measures. The magnitude of relation differed by measurement approaches: text reading measured by text reading efficiency and maze tasks had the strongest relation with reading comprehension; text reading had stronger relations with reading comprehension measured by the multiple-choice, the cloze task, and oral open-ended tasks than the written open-ended and retell tasks. The patterns of relations were the same when correcting for measurement error, although magnitudes were generally stronger.