Does CBM maze assess reading comprehension in 8–9-year olds at-risk for dyslexia?

Recent research has reported the word-level, code-related focus of curriculum-based measures (CBM) of reading comprehension such as Maze (Muijselaar et al., 2017) with typically developing readers, but research has yet to examine whether this finding also applies to children at-risk for dyslexia. We administered a collection of cognitive, linguistic, CBM, and norm-referenced measures to children whose word reading and decoding fluency fell below the 25th percentile and were, therefore, considered at-risk readers. We found that language comprehension contributed additional variance beyond decoding (fluency and accuracy measures) to reading comprehension as assessed by the WIAT-III, but that decoding explained the most variance in children's performance on the CBM Maze task (vis à vis the simple view of reading). The findings have practical implications to the use of CBM Maze as a formative assessment with children at-risk for dyslexia and elucidate the need for additional or alternative assessments to capture the reading comprehension construct.