Are university students' component reading skills related to their text comprehension and academic achievement?

Sex differences in the missing-letter effect: A question of reading or visual–spatial skills?

“…The lack of sex differences found in some previous studies could be due to the fact that undergraduate students constitute the bulk of participants used in experimental psychology, and this population is relatively homogeneous in terms of reading skills. In support of this hypothesis, Jackson (2005) found that women were better university students than men as evidenced by their better university and high school GPA, but were not better readers. The larger missing-letter effect previously found for men by Jorm (1979) and Mohan (1978) would be a rarity due to some sampling peculiarities producing a sample of men reading faster than the sample of women.…”

An examination of the relationship between reading comprehension, higher-level and lower-level reading sub-skills in adults

“…This dissociation has been previously suggested in work with less-skilled readers and individuals with dyslexia (e.g., Wolf, Goldberg, O'Rorke, Gidney, Cirino, & Morris, 2002), but the contribution of fluency to comprehension has not been further investigated for skilled adult readers. One difficulty for interpreting Jackson's (2005) findings, as in the study reported by Perfetti and Hart (2002), is that she did not include any additional analyses (beyond the data reduction) in order to determine the degree to which decoding and fluency were able to predict comprehension ability after taking other measured skills into account.…”

“…The authors did not conduct any follow-up analyses to determine the relative contributions of each of the sub-skills after accounting for basic skills such as decoding and IQ, thus it is difficult to determine the degree to which each of the skills tested contributed to reading comprehension ability. More recently, Jackson (2005) examined the relationship between academic skills (e.g., ACT) and a variety of reading measures among a small sample of highly skilled adult university students. She found that reading measures clustered into three independent components – decoding accuracy, reading speed, and text comprehension.…”

Lexical processing skill in college-age resilient readers

“…College students vary widely in their skill at phonological analysis (Annett, 1999;Jackson, 2005;Martino & Hoffman, 2002) and it is important to determine what the consequences of this variation might be. Previous studies of how resilient readers differ from normal readers have yielded mixed results.…”