Search results for " Comprehension"
showing 10 items of 243 documents
Contextual diversity favors the learning of new words in children regardless of their comprehension skills
2021
Available online 6 November 2021 Recent research has shown the benefits of high contextual diversity, defined as the number of different contexts in which a word appears, when incidentally learning new words. These benefits have been found both in laboratory settings and in ecological settings such as the classroom during regular hours. To examine the nature of this effect in young readers aged 11–13 years, we analyzed whether these benefits are modulated by the individuals’ reading comprehension scores; that is, would better comprehenders benefit the most from contextual diversity? The manipulation of contextual diversity was done by inserting the novel words into three different contexts/…
Age-Related Changes in Predictive Capacity Versus Internal Model Adaptability: Electrophysiological Evidence that Individual Differences Outweigh Eff…
2015
Hierarchical predictive coding has been identified as a possible unifying principle of brain function, and recent work in cognitive neuroscience has examined how it may be affected by age related changes. Using language comprehension as a test case, the present study aimed to dissociate age-related changes in prediction generation versus internal model adaptation following a prediction error. Event related brain potentials (ERPs) were measured in a group of older adults (60-81 years; n = 40) as they read sentences of the form "The opposite of black is white/yellow/nice." Replicating previous work in young adults, results showed a target related P300 for the expected antonym ("white"; an eff…
Detection of explanation obstacles in scientific texts: the effect of an understanding task vs. an experiment task
2013
The aim of this study is to analyse the effect of tasks on the detection of explanation obstacles when secondary school students read scientific texts. Students were instructed to read short passages under different task conditions, and to ask questions if necessary. Obstacle detection was operationalised in terms of the type of questions asked by the students. The experiment examined the influence of goals associated with the task of reading to understand a text vs. reading to perform a procedure described by the text (a science experiment). Significantly, more explanation obstacles were found in the understanding condition than in the experiment condition. Scientific text also had an effe…
Prediction of the difficulty level in a standardized reading comprehension test : contributions from cognitive psychology and psychometrics
2013
Esta investigación busca identificar posibles variables predictoras del nivel de dificultad de los ítems de comprensión de lectura utilizados en una prueba psicométrica estandarizada para la admisión a una institución universitaria. Se propusieron varios posibles predictores del nivel de dificultad, a saber: densidad proposicional, negaciones, estructura sintáctica, dificultad del vocabulario, presencia elementos de realce (palabras resaltadas tipográficamente), abstracción del ítem y grado de similitud entre opción correcta y texto relevante para resolver el ítem. Mediante el Modelo Logístico Lineal de Rasgo Latente se encontró que la cantidad de proposiciones, la estructura sintáctica y, …
Supporting struggling readers with digital game-based learning
2019
This study investigates the effectiveness of a digital game—GraphoLearn (GL)—in supporting second-grade students who have persistent difficulties with acquiring accurate and fluent reading skills. The participants (N = 37) were randomly assigned either to a 6-week intervention including sessions with GL, in addition to school-provided support, or a control group receiving only school-provided support. The intervention took place at the students’ homes and schools under the supervision of their parents and teachers. The results showed that the children who received the GL intervention developed significantly faster in word reading than the control group. Moreover, their reading development w…
Integrating digital documents by means of concept maps: testing an intervention program with eye-movements modelling examples
2021
When using the Internet to learn about a curricular topic students face the challenge of not only understanding each single document, but also of integrating the ideas in a combined representation. Several intervention studies have tested instructional methods, such as building concept maps, aimed at teaching integration of multiple documents to Secondary education and older students. However, building a concept map may be demanding for learners and requires competencies to build maps in an appropriate way. In the current study we explore the extent to which such integration processes relying a concept map mapping instruction can be efficiently taught to 6th grade students. Specifically, we…
Examining the Efficacy of an Intervention to Improve Fluency and Reading Comprehension in Spanish Children with Reading Disabilities
2011
The main goal of the present study was to examine the efficacy of a multi‐component programme to improve reading fluency and text comprehension in Spanish children with reading disabilities (RD). Special needs teachers were trained in the application of the programme, which included repeated reading plus phonological awareness training and grapheme–phoneme decoding training. Instruction was delivered one to one. Participants were 22 students with RD, aged 10–13, distributed in two groups: one with 12 children who received the intervention (experimental group), and the other with 10 children who received no intervention (comparison group). The effects of the training programme were evaluated…
The impact of the pre-instructional cognitive profile on learning gain and final exam of physics courses: a case study.
2006
The case study described in this paper investigates the relationship among some pre-instructional knowledge, the learning gain and the final physics performance of computing engineering students in the introductory physics course. The results of the entrance engineering test (EET) have been used as a measurement of reading comprehension, logic and mathematics skills and basic physics knowledge of a sample of 47 Computing Engineering freshmen at the University of Palermo (Italy). These data give a significant picture of the initial knowledge status of a student choosing engineering studies. The students' physics learning gain has been calculated using a standardized tool in mechanics: the fo…
Experimental evaluation of hypertext access structures
2002
Transient hypertextual access structures (THASs) are temporary graphs formed automatically on the basis of the situation-dependent information needs of software engineers. The approach is implemented in the HyperSoft system, which is a hypertext-based software maintenance support tool. THASs highlight the relevant parts of the program and enable nonlinear browsing between them. The system also supports various graphical views whose elements are linked to the program text. This paper describes the effects of using these hypertextual structures in two separate experiments. The subjects of both experiments were computer science students (total N = 70). In both experiments, the subjects perform…
Instrucción en estrategias de comprensión lectora mediante enseñanza recíproca: efectos del agrupamiento de los estudiantes
2013
The aim of this study was to compare the effects of two grouping formats on the reading comprehension. Reading comprehension Instruction used reciprocal teaching (RT) that is an instructional procedure to teach students cognitive strategies that might lead to improved reading comprehension. A sample of 43 students in the fourth year of primary education was selected: 18 children were instructed in regular classroom (GG), 8 were instructed in small group (PG), while the remaining 17 made up the comparison group (GC). Two types of comprehension measures were used: tasks of specific effects (getting the main idea, comprehension-monitoring test) and transfer effect measures (standardized test, …