This study examines the development of students' reading comprehension, multiliteracy skills, and reading self-concept from third grade through the end of comprehensive school. Reading comprehension and multiliteracy are essential for navigating today's complex, multimedia, and text-rich digital environment. These skills enable students to critically interpret and manage diverse text types and information flows.

Reading comprehension involves an interactive process between the reader and the text, where various cognitive skills and comprehension strategies are employed to actively process information (Lerkkanen, 2010). It is categorized into different levels based on the reader's ability to utilize the text, make connections to other texts, their own thinking, and the broader context. In the current information-rich society, mere reading comprehension is insufficient. The demand for critical understanding and the ability to handle diverse forms of communication—linguistic, spatial, visual, auditory, gestural, and multimodal is higher than ever.

The integration of reading comprehension and multiliteracy serves as a comprehensive indicator of the cognitive abilities necessary for processing and understanding information. Utilizing a unique longitudinal dataset (n=2200) based on the Finnish learning-to-learn framework (Hautamäki et al., 2002; Vainikainen, 2022), this research explores how these skills evolve during comprehensive school years and how their development is intertwined with the evolution of motivational beliefs. According to Marsh (1988), a positive relationship exists between academic achievement and self-concept, a finding supported by Chapman et al. (2000), who note that the development level of reading self-concept significantly affects the progression of reading skills, text comprehension, and students’ motivation to engage with and assimilate new information. The main purpose of this study is to answer the following questions:

1. How do pupils` reading comprehension and multiliteracy skills as well as reading self-concept develop during the comprehensive school years from the third to the ninth grade?
2. Do reading self-concepts in the third and the sixth grades predict the level of reading comprehension skills in the sixth and ninth grades?
3. How do gender and level of mother’s education explain the level differences and changes in reading self-concept?  

The Learning to Learn study is designed as a longitudinal study with three measurement points (i.e. year 2016, when pupils were in third grade; year 2018, when pupils were in sixth grade; and year 2021, when pupils were in ninth grade) in one city in the capital area of Finland. The study included all students (=2200) who were in third grade in 2016 and were followed up until the end of the comprehensive school. The measures used were based on the Finnish Learning to Learn framework (Hautamäki et al., 2002). Reading comprehension was assessed by two tasks based on expository texts. In the hierarchy-rating task, which was based on the theoretical framework of Kintsch and van Dijk (Citation, 1978), the pupils were asked to read a one-page text and then assess 16 statements based on the text as to whether they present a good description of the text as a whole, important information regarding the content of the text, or refer to less important details in the text (Lyytinen & Lehto, Citation, 1998). Due to their complexity, reading comprehension tasks were only used with sixth and ninth graders. In contrast, third-graders’ reading comprehension was assessed within the framework of the multiliteracy tasks described below. Regarding multiliteracy, the survey focuses specifically on basic, visual, and media literacy, which can be considered part of it. A multiliteracy test was conducted with third, sixth, and ninth grade students. The total score for the multiliteracy test was calculated for third grade students based on 18 items, for sixth grade students based on 22 items, and for ninth grade students based on 20 items. The task’s reliability was acceptable for a cognitive test. The total score was converted to the percentage of correct answers (max. 100 points). Reading self-concept was measured with a scale based on Marsh’s work on academic self-concept (Marsh et al., 1988). The scale consisted of three items on a seven-point Likert scale ranging from one (not true at all) to seven (very true). Data were analysed with SPSS24 for descriptive statistics and Mplus 7.2 for linear growth curve models. First, we analysed the development of reading comprehension skills and self-concept in reading at the level of the whole data, after which differences in development depending on the gender and mother’s education level were examined.

Our results show that students' reading comprehension skills, as well as multiliteracy, improved from sixth to ninth grade. Students' reading self-concept developed from third to ninth grade in a manner consistent with other beliefs, i.e. it decreased steadily between measurement points. This trend aligns with typical findings in motivation literature, which often show that positive motivational beliefs decline with age. The development of reading self-concept, reading comprehension, and multiliteracy was examined using a linear growth curve model. The model was implemented for reading comprehension and multiliteracy. The linear growth curve model fitted the data well (RMSEA = ,034, CFI = ,984, TLI = ,982). The initial level sixth grade reading comprehension test score (β = .23, p < .001) and the baseline self-concept in the third grade (β= .29, p < .001) statistically significantly predicted the student's success in the ninth grade reading comprehension test. On the other hand, regarding multiliteracy, the baseline level of self-concept in the third grade predicted the multiliteracy test performance in the sixth grade (β = .35, p < .001). As expected, multiliteracy test scores in sixth grade predicted ninth grade test performance (β = .38, p < .001). Gender-based analyses showed no differences in the strength and development of girls' and boys' reading self-concept. Overall, the model fitted the data well (RMSEA = .044, CFI = .977, TLI = .975) and explained about 17% of the ninth grade reading comprehension test scores for girls and about 10% for boys. Examinations according to the mother's educational background showed that the model still fitted the data well (RMSEA = .043, CFI = .978, TLI = .976). There were differences in the students' reading self-concept according to the mother's educational background.

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