Search results for " Reading"
showing 10 items of 463 documents
Literacy Skills and Online Research and Comprehension : Struggling Readers Face Difficulties
2019
The present study evaluated the extent to which literacy skills (reading fluency, written spelling, and reading comprehension), together with nonverbal reasoning, prior knowledge, and gender, are related to students’ online research and comprehension (ORC) performance. The ORC skills of 426 sixth graders were measured using a Finnish adaptation of the Online Research and Comprehension Assessment. Results of a structural equation model showed that these ORC skills were divided into six highly correlated factors, and that they formed a common factor in ORC. Altogether, these predictor variables explained 57% of the variance in ORC. Reading comprehension, along with gender, was the strongest p…
An In-between Reader : Situatedness and Belonging in Tove Jansson’s Helsinki
2021
Finnish-Swedish artist and writer Tove Jansson (1914–2001), widely known as the author of the Moomin books, was born in Helsinki and resided there for the greater part of her life. The city features as a setting for her adult-oriented fiction – notably, semi-autobiographical fix-up novels Sculptor’s Daughter (1968/2015) and Fair Play (1989/2011). This article adopts a situated approach to literary geography, examining the researcher’s own position as a Helsinki resident and a ‘situated’ reader. Using autoethnography as a method, I analyze how the city and Jansson’s life narrative are co-produced by the writer, her texts, texts about her (such as biographies and press articles) and myself as…
Political Shakespeare and the Blessing of Art
2018
This text attempts to detail the functions and effects of some of Shakespeare's aesthetic strategies, and to determine their relationship to ideology. While this is critical territory that cultural materialists and new historicists have extensively mapped, the current text avoids the preferred methods of enquiry that these lines take. Rather than giving focus to the containment strategies of a dominant ideology, my investigation proceeds via a close reading of certain elements from Act 5 of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. I attempt to demonstrate that meaning in the play is determined and encompassed within the self-reflective and dissimulating structures of Shakespeare's art. I su…
Promoting sixth graders’ credibility evaluation of Web pages: An intervention study
2020
Abstract This study investigated whether a teacher-led intervention program on online inquiry improved sixth graders' performance in a credibility evaluation task. Students (N = 342) were divided into two conditions, an intervention group (190 students) and a control group (152 students). The intervention program (21 × 45 min lessons) was implemented during a six-week course as a part of normal schoolwork. The program included explicit teaching of online inquiry skills: searching for information (3 lessons), evaluating credibility of information (3 lessons), and synthesizing information (3 lessons). In addition, the skills taught were applied in two online inquiry projects comprising 12 les…
Does early reading instruction promote the rate of acquisition? A comparison of two transparent orthographies
2015
Abstract This study examines the development of children's reading skills in two transparent orthographies, Estonian and Finnish. Formal reading instruction begins one year earlier in Estonia than in Finland; thus, it was expected that Estonian children would outperform their Finnish peers in reading achievement during grade 1. In this study, 433 Estonian and 353 Finnish first graders were assessed for letter knowledge, phoneme awareness, and reading accuracy and fluency at the beginning of first grade while reading fluency and reading comprehension were assessed in the final semester of first grade. The results showed that, despite Estonian children's better reading skills at the beginning…
Teachers’ Ability to Identify Children at Early Risk for Reading Difficulties in Grade 1
2017
The aim of the study was to investigate what kinds of assessment practices classroom teachers and special educational needs (SEN) teachers use in assessing first grade students' pre-reading skills (letter knowledge and phonological skills). Further, we investigated to what extent teachers were able to identify difficulties in pre-reading skills of the children with the lowest achievement scores. The accuracy of teacher ratings of students' pre-reading skills was studied by comparing teacher ratings to actual test scores. The data from two Finnish longitudinal studies were used: JLD sample (class teachers, n = 91; SEN teachers, n = 51; 200 students) and First Steps sample (class teachers, n …
Why do boys and girls perform differently on PISA Reading in Finland? The effects of reading fluency, achievement behaviour, leisure reading and home…
2017
The present study examined gender gap in Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) Reading and mediators of the gender gap in a Finnish sample (n = 1,309). We examined whether the gender gap in PISA Reading performance can be understood via the effects of reading fluency, achievement behaviour (mastery orientation and task-avoidant behaviour) or the amount of time spent with leisure reading and homework. Girls outperformed boys in all measures except for achievement behaviour. The models explaining PISA Reading were not different: For boys and girls, reading fluency, mastery orientation, leisure book reading and homework explained the variance in PISA Reading scores. The gender ef…
Home Literacy Activities and Children’s Reading Skills, Independent Reading, and Interest in Literacy Activities From Kindergarten to Grade 2
2020
According to the Home Literacy Model (Sénéchal and LeFevre, 2002, 2014), young children can be exposed to two distinct types of literacy activities at home. First, meaning-related literacy activities are those where print is present but is not the focus of the parent–child interaction, for example, when parents read storybooks to their children. In contrast, code-related literacy activities focus on the print, for example, activities such as when parents teach their children the names and sounds of letters or to read words. The present study was conducted to expand the Home Literacy Model by examining its relation with children’s engagement in literacy activities at home and at school as Fi…
Longitudinal Associations of First-grade Teaching with Reading in Early Primary School
2019
The present study examined the longitudinal associations between first-grade teaching practices and children's reading skills development from Grade 1 to Grade 3. Using the Early Childhood Classroom Observation Measure (ECCOM), the teaching practices of 32 Finnish teachers were observed in Grade 1. Students' (N = 359) word recognition and sentence reading skills were assessed yearly from Grade 1 to Grade 3. The person-oriented analysis identified three profiles of teaching practices in Grade 1: child-centred teaching style, teacher-directed teaching style, and a mixed child-centred and teacher-directed teaching style. Furthermore, the results showed that children whose Grade 1 teachers used…
The Role of General and Selective Task Instructions on Students’ Processing of Multiple Conflicting Documents
2019
This study was designed to test the role of general and selective task instructions when processing documents, which vary as regards trustworthiness and position toward a conflicting topic. With selective task instructions, we refer to concrete guidelines as how to read the texts and how to select appropriate documents and contents, in contrast to general task instructions. Sixty-one secondary school students were presented with four different conflicting documents in an electronic learning environment and were told to write an essay based on the information from the texts. Only half of the students were told to only use information from two out of the four texts to write their essay (i.e.,…