Özet:

Central to a nation’s pursuit of its social, political, and economic goals is a literate and welleducated population. Furthermore, the ability to read is fundamental to individual intellectual development and personal growth. Knowledge about how well students can read, together with information about which policy-related factors are implicated in understanding reading achievement, can provide policy makers and researchers worldwide with insights into how to improve literacy and reading achievement. The aim of this study is to model the factors related to the reading comprehension skills of 4th grade students according to the PIRLS 2001 data. A model has been proposed by making use of the student, teacher, family questionnaires used in the PIRLS 2001 study, with variables considered as related to the reading comprehension skills of students, in addition to taking into account the related literature. A structural equation model has been used in order to define the relation among the students’ reading comprehension skills and the specifications of the family, school, teacher and student. Taking into account the regression equation obtained by the result of the structural equation model analysis, it is seen that the determination coefficient is 0.51. This shows that 0.51 of reading comprehension skills of the Turkish students taking place in the PIRLS study can be explained by the features of family, school, teacher, and student, as specified for this study

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