Reading fluency as a measure of educational level

Education exerts a powerful influence on the performance on neuropsychological tests. Recently, the number of years that a person attends school has been the preferred method to operationalize educational level (EL). However, reading fluency (RF) has emerged as an alternative method that can define the quality of education.

To compare the influence of the number of years of education with RF on the cognitive performance in a control sample.

Fifty-six control participants with varying ages (17-87 years) and levels of education (3-19 years of formal schooling) were administered a neuropsychological scale along with an RF task. This scale measured attention, memory, language, executive functions, and constructional praxis. The RF task consisted of a short text. The score was the number of words read correctly per minute. Pearson's r was used to compute correlations.

Results showed that RF had a higher correlation (0.53) than the years of schooling (0.38) with the scores of the neuropsychological scale.

Reading fluency is a short, practical task that is easy to use in different languages and is a promising tool for EL assessment. It is also an adequate alternative to the reading of irregular words as a qualitative measure of EL.