The Assessment of Writing, Self-Monitoring, and Reading (AWSM Reader) and Relations with Executive Functioning

Extant literature measuring academic outcomes in school-aged children indicates a significant overlap in the domains of writing and reading. Cognitive predictors, such as executive function (EF), have been implicated for both domains, though less is known regarding its joint relation to reading and writing. In this study, we focus on evaluating the psychometric properties of a novel measure that directly evaluates both reading comprehension and writing, as well as the contribution of EF to these domains. Participants consisted of 377 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade struggling readers. The Assessment of Writing, Self-Monitoring, and Reading (AWSM Reader) was created to measure reading comprehension and writing (Key Words and Ideas Expressed) within the same topic. Reliability was α = .58 for the AWSM Reader reading comprehension, α = .80 for Key Words, and α = .75 for Ideas Expressed. The AWSM Reader validity for reading was r = .50, for Key Words was r = .50, and Ideas Expressed was r = .47, (all ps < .001). Correlations between the AWSM Reader reading and writing portions were r = .56 and r = .51 (both ps < .001), respectively. EF was a unique predictor of AWSM Reader reading comprehension (ηp2 = .016, p = .005) and Key Words (ηp2 = .014, p = .010), and was approaching significance for Ideas Expressed (ηp2 = .008, p = .065), over demographic and language covariates. However, partialing both language and EF, the reading portion of the AWSM Reader continued to have significant correlations with Key Words and Ideas Expressed, r = .50 and r = .46 (both p < .001), respectively. Overall, the results stress the difficulty in constructing combined reading and writing measures, but give direction for how this might be accomplished. Further, these results highlight the contribution of EF to reading and writing, though EF (and language) did not fully account for the relation between the domains.