Research suggests that children’s understanding of text can be improved by the explicit teaching of those comprehension strategies that are used implicitly by skilled readers, particularly the use of self-regulating strategies to generate questions about text. This study of the teaching of comprehension in 51 London Key Stage 2 classrooms explores the extent to which comprehension strategies ar...

We examined how using five different simplified texts on the same subject would affect reading comprehension. 335 students in grades four through eight read one of retrieved from Newsela.com and then completed a comprehension test. Results 3-way ANOVA showed no significant interaction among grade, level text condition. Pairwise comparisons that below-level readers’ scores improved only with ext...

PURPOSE To characterize the performance of students with reading difficulties in decoding and reading comprehension tasks as well as to investigate the possible correlations between them. METHODS Sixty students (29 girls) from 3rd to 5th grades of public Elementary Schools were evaluated. Thirty students (Research Group - RG), ten from each grade, were nominated by their teachers as presentin...

The Indexical Hypothesis suggests a new method for enhancing children’s reading comprehension. Young readers may not consistently “index,” or map, words to the objects the words represent. Consequently, these readers fail to derive much meaning from the text. The instructional method involves manipulating toy objects referred to in the text (e.g., a barn, a tractor, a horse, in a text about a f...

According to current psychological models of deduction, people can draw inferences on the basis of information that they receive from different sources at different times. In 3 reading-comprehension experiments, the authors demonstrated that premises that appear far apart in a text (distant) are not accessed and are therefore not used as a basis for logical inferences (Experiment 1), unless the...

Successful learning from text takes place when the cognitive demands of the learning task – i.e. the comprehension and retention of text material – and the metacognitive demands of the learning task – i.e. the accurate assessment of one’s own learning process—are met. The present study was designed to investigate text titles – a factor known to affect cognitive learning processesas well as the ...

Evidence suggests that higher order linguistic functioning such as text comprehension is particularly vulnerable to emotional modulation. Gender has been identified as an important moderating variable in emotional expression such that girls tend toward internalizing emotions (e.g., sadness, anxiety) whereas boys tend toward externalizing emotions (e.g., anger, combativeness), which may influenc...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of variations in text density levels and the cognitive style of field dependence on learning from a CBI tutorial, based on the dependent measures of achievement, reading comprehension, and reading rate, and of lesson completion time. Eighty college undergraduate students were randomly assigned to text density levels, after being assigned ...