Procesos lectores antes y después de la pandemia en unidades educativas de la ciudad de Cuenca, periodos 2018-2019 y 2022-2023

Abstract

The reading process encompasses various cognitive operations that students perform, from decoding to understanding the text. The COVID-19 pandemic presented significant educational challenges by establishing a virtual modality, which affected the development of reading skills. This descriptive, non-experimental quantitative study and cross-section analyzes the levels of reading processes in Cuenca students before (2018-2019) and after (2022-2023) the pandemic. To collect data, the authors applied the "PROLEC-R" Reading Process Battery to 243 children with an average age of 8.94 years. The results indicated a decrease in fundamental reading skills, especially in letter recognition, reading words and pseudowords, and text comprehension, suggesting a setback in acquiring these skills. However, a slight improvement was observed in grammatical structure mastery and the use of punctuation marks in 2023. No significant correlations were found between age, sex, and reading performance, although girls excelled in some linguistic tasks. In conclusion, the low scores in reading process levels after the pandemic, should not be attributed exclusively to this event since the results before the pandemic also showed low scores in various areas. These findings coincide with other studies at the national level. Hence, the recommendation is to consider variables such as socioeconomic level and pedagogical strategies to improve academic performance in the future.