Reading literacy and reading attitudes of first-year university students

Abstract

Attrition in higher education poses a challenge globally. A well-designed support system may reduce the dropout rate by providing objective feedback on students’ prior knowledge and skills. At the University of Szeged, an overarching project was developed to address the complex issue of attrition and to develop services that may tackle this problem. A fundamental pillar of the program was to create an online assessment system in order to determine students’ development all level of skills that are essential components of learning and further development in order to increase the efficiency of university studies and reduce attrition rates (Molnár és Csapó, 2019). Reading literacy is one of these fundamental skills, so the assessment of this domain have taken place every September since the beginning of the project. The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a study designed to assess reading literacy and reading attitudes among students (N = 1351) who began their studies in higher education in 2017. The results are described in the light of some background variables. According to our findings, few students’ performance fell below the average, therefore, it is highly unlikely that reading difficulties will underlie the attrition of theme assured population. It is noteworthy that, although in some cases the analyses have shown significant differences in terms of text and gender, the differences are so marginal that pedagogical intervention involving these factors does not seem to be necessary. Our data do not only suggest that the vast majority of students has the ability to comprehend different texts well, but they also show that first-year students have a positive attitude to reading. Findings also underpin previous results on the relationship between reading attitude and reading achievement, students who with more developed reading skills possess a more positive attitude toward reading than those whose reading performance is weaker.