Abstract
<p>The purpose of this study was to identify factors that influence performance on the FCAT Grade 10 Reading Test. Participants were fifty-five 11 th graders [23 males (42%) and 32 females (58%)], mostly Hispanic (1 African American, 1 Asian, and 53 Hispanic), from a diverse high school located in a large metropolitan area. Portions of the Woodcock Johnson III Achievement Tests and the Qualitative Reading Inventory - 3 were administered to each student individually. The study sought answers to the following questions: (1) What is the correlation between students' performance on the FCAT Grade 10 Reading Test and their performance on broad reading comprehension tasks, as assessed by the Woodcock Johnson III Tests of Achievement? (2) To what extent does performance on measures of phonemic awareness, word attack, reading vocabulary, and passage comprehension, as measured by the Woodcock Johnson III Tests of Achievement, and words per minutes, as measured by an individual reading inventory, specifically, the Qualitative Reading Inventory - 3, explain variation in performance on the FCAT Grade 10 Reading Test? Blanton and Wood's (2006) theory of reading was used to account for the reading process of and instruction needed by adolescents who struggle with reading. Using the raw data, means and standard deviations were computed, descriptive statistics and intercorrelations were generated, and a multiple regression was conducted. The correlation between FCAT and Broad Reading was positive and statistically significant (p<.05). Issues of multicollinearity were examined. Scores on the phonemic awareness, word attack, reading vocabulary, and passage comprehension subtests from the Woodcock Johnson III Tests of Achievement and the words per minute subtest of the Qualitative Reading Inventory - 3, as a set, accounted for 35 percent of the variance in scores on the FCAT. Reading vocabulary was the only independent variable that contributed unique variance (6.6%) to prediction of the dependent variable. A large amount of variability was still left to be explained. The results of this study did not provide support for the idea that posited constituent components of skilled reading make unique and separable contributions to overall reading achievement of adolescents who are poor readers.</p>