Evaluating the Simple View of Reading for Children With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Abstract

The 'simple view of reading' is an influential model of reading comprehension which asserts that children's reading comprehension performance can be explained entirely by their decoding and language comprehension skills. Children with ADHD often exhibit difficulty across all three of these reading domains on standardized achievement tests, yet it is unclear whether the simple view of reading is sufficient to explain reading comprehension performance for these children. The current study was the first to use multiple indicators and latent estimates to examine the veracity of key predictions from the simple view of reading in a clinically-evaluated sample of 250 children with and without ADHD (ages 8-13, M_age=10.29, SD=1.47; 93 girls; 70% White/Non-Hispanic). Results of the full-sample structural equation model revealed that decoding and language comprehension explained all (R²=.99) of the variance in reading comprehension for children with and without ADHD. Further, multigroup modeling (ADHD, Non-ADHD) indicated that there was no difference in the quantity of variance explained for children with ADHD versus clinically-evaluated children without ADHD, and that the quantity of explained variance did not differ from 100% for either group. Sensitivity analyses indicated that these effects were generally robust to control for monomethod bias, time sampling error, and IQ. These findings are consistent with 'simple view' predictions that decoding and language comprehension are both necessary and together sufficient for explaining children's reading comprehension skills. The findings extend prior work by indicating that the 'simple view' holds for both children with ADHD and clinically-evaluated children without ADHD.

Keywords: ADHD; decoding; language comprehension; reading comprehension; simple view of reading.

Figure 1.

Whole-group structural equation model of decoding and language comprehension predicting reading comprehension. Standardized loadings are shown for the full sample, ADHD subgroup, and non-ADHD subgroup, respectively (all p<.01). Age, sex, and SES are controlled for but not depicted for clarity.