Classification of students with reading comprehension difficulties: The roles of motivation, affect, and psychopathology

Attempts to evaluate the cognitive-motivational profiles of students with reading comprehension difficulties have been scarce. The purpose of the present study was twofold: (a) to assess the discriminatory validity of cognitive, motivational, affective, and psychopathological variables for identification of students with reading difficulties, and (b) to profile students with and without reading comprehension difficulties across those variables. Participants were 87 students who scored more than 1.3 SD below the mean on a standardized reading comprehension battery and 500 typical students in grades 2 through 4. Results using linear discriminant analyses indicated that students with reading comprehension difficulties could be accurately predicted by low cognitive skills and high competitiveness. Using cluster analysis, students with significant deficits in reading comprehension were mostly assigned to a low skill/low motivation group (termed helpless) or a low skill/high motivation group (termed motivated low achievers). Based on these findings, it was concluded that motivation, emotions, and psychopathology play a pivotal role in explaining the achievement tendencies of students with reading comprehension difficulties.