Reasoning skills as mediators of reading fluency and comprehension in adolescent readers

Reading comprehension is a central outcome of literacy instruction because it enables learners to construct, evaluate, and use meaning across academic and everyday contexts. Reading fluency is widely viewed as a bridging process because accurate, appropriately paced, and prosodic reading reduces the moment-to-moment demands of print processing and supports meaning construction (Pikulski & Chard, 2005 ). Yet fluency alone does not explain why adolescent readers with similar word-reading skills can differ in comprehension. Contemporary models, including the Direct and Indirect Effects model of Reading (DIER; Kim, 2020 ), suggest that higher-order processes may help explain this variability by supporting readers as they integrate information, generate inferences, and evaluate textual claims.