PROJECT SUMMARY
It is estimated that 36 million adults in the United States struggle with basic literacy
skills. Deficient literacy skills have costly societal, economic, and individual implications (e.g.,
higher crime and unemployment rates; lower health and computer literacy skills). Yet, there is a
paucity of rigorous research to understand these adults' underlying reading processes and an
over-reliance on reading models and assessments developed for children in adult literacy
programs. Recent evidence suggests that morphological awareness (MA), an understanding
of the smallest units of meaning (i.e., prefixes), is an important contributor to the reading
comprehension (RC) skills of struggling adult readers. MA remains uniquely predictive of
RC controlling for prominent component skills from the Simple View of Reading (SVR)
framework, including decoding and oral vocabulary. However, MA has been assessed for
struggling adult and child readers using several experimental measures. Recent work with
struggling adult readers and adolescent readers has assessed the dimensionality of the
MA construct, with a lack of consensus as to what aspects of MA contribute to the
multidimensionality. Emerging work with adolescents suggests that MA is best represented as a
general factor (integrating overlap in shared variance among different MA measures) as well as
specific factors (unique variance accounted for by task-, item-and person-specific aspects of
MA). In addition, the general MA factor and the specific factors have exhibited differential
relations with RC. Given the noted importance of MA to the RC skills of struggling adult
readers, these findings suggest the need to better understand the construct validity of MA to
develop better and more sensitive MA measures and to place MA in a larger model of RC.
Thus, the aims of this project are twofold: a. to examine the psychometric properties of MA
measures and dimensionality of the MA construct in order to refine and create a new MA battery
for struggling adult readers; and b. to integrate MA within the SVR framework, examine its
relations to RC, and to compare whether the relations among MA and known correlates to RC
are equivalent between more-skilled (college students) and less-skilled, struggling adult
readers. Meta-analyses in the children's literature suggest that MA interventions build
vocabulary, decoding, and RC skills. Intervention work with struggling adult readers has
focused primarily on decoding, phonics, and fluency, and produced minimal to no gains. Thus,
it is imperative to build valid assessments to explore additional, malleable skills (i.e., MA) for
future intervention work with this population.
