Predictors of multiple-document comprehension among third-grade children with reading difficulties and disabilities

Abstract

Facility with learning from multiple text documents is critical for college and career readiness. However, children with reading difficulties and disabilities have been largely excluded from research on multiple document comprehension. Accordingly, little is known about how children with reading difficulties and disabilities perform on multiple-document tasks, the factors that predict their performance, and how best to foster their development of this skill. To begin to fill these gaps, we examined concurrent predictors of one dimension of multiple-document comprehension, intertextual integration (ie, the ability to integrate information presented across two or more text documents), among third-grade children with reading difficulties and disabilities ( N = 70). Correlational analyses revealed that children's intertextual integration performance was significantly and positively associated with single-document comprehension (SDC) but not with word-level reading (WLR) or passage-reading fluency (PRF). Multiple-regression analyses indicated that SDC significantly predicted intertextual integration but that WLR and PRF did not.