Research questions and hypotheses:

In the development of students’ reading skills, many factors may involve. In this research, we intended to focus on individual, familial and school variables which were related to the element of “the reader” from the perspective of the development of students’ reading comprehension,  integrating reading comprehension with its related factors into a multilevel model in one study.The hypotheses of this study are (1) students’ reading comprehension can be predicted by individual variables (gender, reading motivation, and metacognitive awareness of reading strategies), familial variables (household income), and school variables (teacher’s qualification and teacher’s experience); (2) Teacher’s qualification and their experience are associated with students’ reading motivation and metacognitive awareness of reading strategies.

Theoretical framework:

Students’ reading competence is critical in understanding texts or other related materials in content areas (Chapman & King, 2009); however, recent research indicates that there was a decline in the students’ reading achievement in some age groups in some areas or countries during the past decade (Netten, 2012). Hence, there is an increasing interest in what factors may associate with students reading comprehension (OECD, 2010; OECD, 2011). Previous research showed that students’ gender, reading motivation, socioeconomic status, home reading environment, and teacher-student relationship could be correlates of reading comprehension.

The RAND Reading Study Group (2002) has proposed a definition that reading comprehension is “the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language” (p. 11). They believed that this process entailed three elements: The reader, the text and the activity. In the development of students’ reading skills, many factors may involve.  From the perspective of gender difference, researchers discovered that reading ability and attitudes have a close relation with gender (e.g., Logan & Johnston, 2009). As an individual element, reading motivation has been discovered as a key factor associated with reading performance (e.g., De Naeghel, Van Keer, & Vansteenkiste, & Rosseel, 2012; Logan, Medford, & Hughes, 2011). Chiu and McBride-Chang (2010) found that students’ family socioeconomic status (SES) is positively correlated with individual reading achievement.

In this study we will develop a comprehensive multilevel model on the relation between reading comprehension and its coorelates in secondary school students. In the model, individual and familial variables are nested within school variables. In level 1, students’ individual and familial characteristics, including gender, autonomous reading motivation, controlled reading motivation, metacognitive awareness of reading strategies, and household income, were used to predict reading comprehension; in level 2, school characteristics, including teacher’s qualification and teacher’s experience, were added to the model to assess their correlation with reading comprehension.

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