Development of reading skills in second grade elementary school students

Abstract

Acquisition of reading skills is one of the most significant tasks of early education. For that reason, this paper deals with monitoring of the development of reading skills in secondary grade elementary school students, aiming at, through the characteristics of speed, accuracy, and fluency of reading, describing the development of reading skills, that is, understanding the text read. The sample of the research is 145 students, with the instrument used a reading test featuring a brief text followed by 4 comprehension questions. The students are required to read the text in 3 time intervals, given our leading hypothesis that reading skills are developed gradually, which is confirmed by the results. The latter point to a statistically significant difference between male and female students in terms of understanding the text read, with female students scoring higher on this scale. On the other hand, when the speed, accuracy, and fluency of reading are concerned, there is no statistically significant difference between the two groups, although male students score higher in the categories of fluency and speed and female students in the category of accuracy.