Reading comprehension skills assessment in elementary school children: Profiles of comprehenders

Introduction. - The aim of the study was to investigate reading comprehension skills in 7 to 10-year-old children and to present a new tool for assessing reading comprehension skills in elementary school children. Two aspects of text comprehension were assessed: literal comprehension skills and inference generation (with two subtypes of inferences, coherence inferences and knowledge-based inferences). Method. - Two narratives of varying length and complexity have been constructed and presented to 498 French-speaking children from second grade to fifth grade. Results. - The results showed an evolution of performance with school level. Children's scores also depended on the type of comprehension skill evaluated (literal versus inferential) and difficulty of texts. Furthermore, cluster analysis yielded five profiles that clearly differ on children's ability to respond to either literal questions, coherence inferential questions, or knowledge-based inferential questions. Conclusion. - The existence of different profiles of comprehenders is discussed in terms of theoretical implications. Finally, some limitations and way of improvement are presented. (C) 2014 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.