Individual differences in reading among schoolchildren in grades 1-4

Reading skill is one of the key skills in modern society. Difficulties in mastering reading in a timely manner, the associated delays in mastering new knowledge negatively affect the development of children, their personality, and the professional qualities of future adult members of society. However, the stages and mechanisms of mastering the reading skill in children are still far from being fully understood, and there are especially few studies of reading in Russian based on Cyrillic script.

The purpose of our study is to assess how the reading skill of younger schoolchildren changes and whether the trajectory of its development depends on individual characteristics.

Within the framework of the project, elementary school students read aloud the text from the «Standardized Assessment of Reading Skills» and read silently 30 sentences from the Russian children's eye movements corpus. The reading takes place using the Eyelink Portable Duo eye-tracker.

Six months later, the study procedure is repeated with the same participants. Thus, we will be able to assess how reading changes in specific children and how much progress depends on the initial reading skill.