Abstract
The presented study is part of the "Reading comprehension - typical development and its risks" research project focused on the definition and exact description of individual and development connections, and the course of reading comprehension development in children of 1st - 4th primary school grades. Reading comprehension research does not have a tradition in Czech reading research.
We lack original data to describe reading comprehension development of Czech primary school children. The only published study assessing reading comprehension development in Czech children has so far been Caravolas, Volín, & Hulme (2005), where authors studied normally developing and dyslexic children.
Assessment of decoding is now covered by quality reading assessment tools adopted for Czech primary school children. However, reading comprehension assessment tools are not used, they barely exist.
Procedures and materials employed for reading comprehension assessment are mainly based on good practice knowledge, not on research based (standardizing) knowledge. In this study, we examine reading comprehension profiles in specific groups of struggling readers and analyze differences in reading comprehension among these groups and an age-control group of children.
We based our project on the simple reading model (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) that allowed inclusion of all of the presented groups of readers.