The effects of selected variables on miscue patterns of adult readers

Abstract

This investigation was structured to examine the reading strategies of adult readers and to examine the many possible sources of variance for producing miscues. This study investigated the reading strategies of three groups of adult readers: 20 Adult Basic Education students, 20 high-risk college freshmen, and 18 college senior Education majors. Data were collected from three separate activities: information obtained from an interview, performance on the Lorge-Thorndike Intelligence Test, and oral reading performance on an informal reading inventory. The Reading Miscue Inventory (RMI) was used to analyze miscue patterns. Fourteen predictor variables were examined in this investigation: (1) text length, (2) interest, (3) familiarity with the style, (4) familiarity with the content, (5) bilingualism, (6) level of reading maturity, (7) non-verbal intelligence, (8) verbal intelligence, (9) conceptualization of reading, (10) group membership, (11) age, (12) number of years since subject had enrolled in a formal educational setting, (13) time spent reading weekly, and (14) readability. Nine criterion measures were used in this study: (1) graphophonic acceptability of miscues, (2) syntactic acceptability of miscues, (3) semantic acceptability of miscuse, (4) percentage of corrected miscues, (5) percentage of miscues resulting in serious meaning loss, and (6) percentage of miscues corrected that had earlier resulted in a loss of meaning. Performance on the questions following the reading of each selection yielded three other criterion measures: literal comprehension, inferential comprehension, and critical comprehension. Several analyses were used to explore the relationship between the predictor variables and the criterion variables. All fourteen predictor variables were used in the nine regression models created. Stepwise regression analysis was used to rank order the predictor variables' importance to each model.