The relation between 6th grade secondary school students' reading skills and their academic success

The aim of this study is to examine how reading comprehension skills among 6th grade secondary school students affect academic success and their relation to gender, mother's level of education and father's level of education. For this reason relational screening model has been used in the study. The population of the study are the 6th grade students in the 18 secondary schools run by the Ministry of Education in the district of Hendek, province of Sakarya. 264 students from various socio-economic backgrounds selected using random sampling method make up the samples of the study. A reading comprehension achievement test developed by Haykır (2012) and comprised of 20 questions has been designated as the data collection tool. Additionally, students' end of term cumulative grade point average taken from the schools the study was carried out was used. SPSS 16.0 software package has been used in the analysis of the data. Spearman correlation analysis has been carried out to identify the correlation between students' reading comprehension skills and their level of academic success, Mann Whitney U and Kruskall Wallis H tests have been applied in the analysis of the sub problems. The results of the research show; a moderate degree of significant correlation(r=,536) between students' reading comprehension skills and their level of academic success, a significant variation in reading comprehension skills between genders, a significant variation in student's academic success relative to mother's level of education, a significant variation in student's academic success relative to father's level of education, no significant variation in students' reading comprehension skills relative to mother's level of education, a significant variation in students' reading comprehension skills relative to father's level of education In the study, various suggestions have been made in consideration of the findings.