PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT In the United States, 67% of 4th graders are reading below proficiency, and this trend persists into adolescence (8th grade). As such, the identification and remediation of reading-related difficulties remains critical. Although many cases of poor reading comprehension result from poor decoding, or the ability to translate written words into their spoken form, a substantial number of children struggle with comprehending text despite having adequate decoding (i.e., specific reading comprehension deficit [SRCD]). SRCD affects 3-15% of children in the general population, a prevalence rate that is similar to and/or exceeds other specific learning disabilities, including dyslexia (3-15%) and dyscalculia (3-6%), which suggests that SRCD impacts a substantial number of children and their families. Decades of research have investigated the origins, prevalence, and prognosis of reading difficulties, but most have focused on the identification and remediation of poor decoding; comparatively fewer studies have prioritized children with SRCD. Although increasingly more work is being done in this area, several significant challenges are uniquely associated with SRCD, which continue to have downstream implications for its identification and remediation and thus requires further study. First, children with SRCD have average decoding and minimal phonological processing deficits. This is notable because deficits in these areas are often cited as early indicators of later reading difficulties, and yet, they provide minimal information about SRCD risk. Second, reading comprehension develops later than other reading-related skills, such as decoding. This is a concern because not all reading difficulties are evident early, which suggests that SRCD has the potential to persist well into adolescence, a period during which reading difficulties are notoriously difficult to remediate. Third, how poor reading comprehension is often defined—reading comprehension lower than (developmentally) expected—implies that weak reading comprehension relative to decoding occurs exclusively at the low tail of the distribution. Although this approach ensures that we capture only those children who are struggling with reading comprehension it ignores the fact that children with poor reading comprehension relative to decoding exist along the entire distribution and may lead us to miss those whose poor reading comprehension is unexpected. In the proposed project, I will address these limitations by moving away from the standard discrepancy definition of SRCD to a more inclusive one and extending a novel approach that has been developed and refined in simulation but has yet to be applied empirically. More specifically, the proposal aims to (1) investigate the nature of specific reading comprehension deficit in large representative samples of childhood and adolescent readers and (2) identify domain-specific, domain-general, and social skills-related correlates of specific reading comprehension deficit. In this way, findings garnered from the proposed project can further inform policy and practice aimed at supporting children whose ability to read text far outpaces their ability to understand it.

PROJECT NARRATIVE The proposed project applies innovative research methodology to four real-world databases to further elucidate the extent to which cognitive-behavioral correlates of reading comprehension act as risk- (deficits) vs. protective factors (strengths) for the development of poor reading comprehension in the face of adequate decoding (i.e., specific reading comprehension deficit) across the full distribution of readers. The current proposal aims to (1) investigate the nature of specific reading comprehension deficit in large representative samples of childhood and adolescent readers and (2) identify domain-specific, domain-general, and social skills-related correlates of specific reading comprehension deficit. Findings generated from this proposal have multiple implications for research, policy, and practice, including the ability to inform theoretical frameworks, hypotheses, and approaches aimed at understanding reading comprehension difficulties as well as develop more accurate identification methods, better prevention, and more efficacious intervention programs to effectively support children who struggle to comprehend text.