Reading and comprehension difficulties in students refer to the problems they experience both in accurately decoding texts and in understanding their content, which may manifest as disfluent reading, pronunciation errors, poor identification of main ideas, or limited ability to relate what is read to prior knowledge; in the university setting, such as among first-year students, these limitations may be associated with various factors, including lack of reading habits, deficiencies in language development, inadequate teaching methods, or even the presence of learning disorders such as dyslexia, which led to a study on reading and comprehension difficulties among first-year students at the Faculty of Psychology, conducted within a quantitative research paradigm, at a descriptive level, using a non-experimental and cross-sectional research design, with a sample of 51 students selected through non-probabilistic sampling from a total population of 120 first-year students at the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Panama, using the Magallanes Reading and Writing Scale: EMLE, TALE-2000 as the research instrument, with results revealing that a significant percentage of students read an average of 134 words per minute, which is considerably below the average observed among university students and the general population, and that a considerable number of students in the Faculty of Psychology show significant difficulties in reading comprehension
