Análisis del efecto san Mateo en un estudio longitudinal sobre el desarrollo lector durante la educación primaria (1.° a 5.°)

The Matthew effect on reading refers the contrasted phenomenon on how differences in performance between good and poor readers can increase over time. A longitudinal study was conducted on the presence/absence of Matthew effect in a sample of 1st to 5th year Primary School children. A total of 51 students who started Primary School in 2011 were evaluated five times by several reading measurement tools: Collective Test of Reading Efficacy (TECLE), PROLEC-R (a battery of tests for the evaluation of reading processes, ACL (a Spanish reading comprehension test), and BEL (a standardised Spanish reading test). Assessment was carried out each June between 2011 and 2015. A group of children (n = 13) considered at risk of being low performance readers (using a percentile criterion below 25 obtained on the TECLE test at the end of the 1st year). A comparison was then made of the progress over 5 years between this group, and a group of average performance readers (n = 26), as well as high-level performance readers (n = 12) from the same sample of participants. Tracking the reader profile of students at risk, helps to determine the changes generated in these children through the different assessments over the five years of the study. The overall results showed differences between the groups assessed, but differences between readers at risk and other groups were not increased. Furthermore, the individual monitoring of students at risk showed that some children improvised his/her performance in reading above the average. Educational suggestions from the study are discussed.