The Effects of Prior Knowledge and Oral Reading Accuracy on Miscues and Comprehension

The effects of prior knowledge (high, low) and oral reading accuracy (95% +, 90–94%) on miscues and comprehension were examined by requiring 57 third-grade average readers to read an expository passage orally. The children had either high prior knowledge of the topic, defined as completing a classroom instructional unit and verified by a free-association test, or low prior knowledge. Children with high prior knowledge made fewer miscues which resulted in meaning loss ( p < .05), and their miscues were less graphically similar to the text word ( p < .01) than children with low prior knowledge. Also, children with high prior knowledge correctly answered more comprehension questions of all types – textually explicit ( p < .01), textually implicit ( p < .05), and scriptally implicit ( p < .001) – than children with low prior knowledge. Support for an interactive-compensatory model of reading is discussed.