Search results for "Comprehension"

Modeling urban growth by cellular automata

1996

International audience; The structural development of human settlements can be characterized as a complex highly feedbacketed process. The assumption that this process is governed by rather few fundamental laws stimulated a considerable research in the field of urban growth during the last decade. Aiming at the comprehension of the basic underlying dynamics different approaches from the field of self-organizing systems have been proposed. In this paper we present a "cellular model" of urban growth dynamics based on the work of White, Engelen and Uljee. As a starting point this model throws some light on the mechanism of urban growth. But even more important, it raises a lot of questions con…

Administration, Scoring, and Reporting Scores

2013

This chapter covers administration, scoring, and reporting scores from language tests and examinations. Procedures typically used in major language examinations and small-scale classroom testing and assessment are both covered. It is argued that the administration, scoring, and reporting procedures are highly dependent on the purpose and stakes of the assessment. Selected national and international guidelines of good practice are reviewed to see what they have to say about these phases of the assessment process, and examples are given on how, for example, high stakes certification and achievement tests differ from teacher-based formative and diagnostic tests. The review considers how the sk…

Proactive and reactive dimensions of life-course agency: mapping student teachers’ language learning experiences

2014

Although the concept of agency has received a lot of interest in recent educational research, its significance in language learning biographies as well as contextual and relational aspects of learner agency are still little studied. This paper aims at a more thorough understanding of agency by studying student teachers’ previous language learning experiences. This paper is based on a dialogical analysis of 12 student teachers’ biographical essays describing their relationship with English as a foreign language. The participants are students in a Finnish class teacher and language teacher education programme that uses English as the primary medium of instruction. The study proposes a tripart…

The inattentive on-screen reading: Reading medium affects attention and reading comprehension under time pressure

2021

This study explored the influence of reading media and reading time-frame on readers' on-task attention, metacognitive calibration, and reading comprehension. One hundred and forty undergraduates were allocated to one of four experimental conditions varying on the reading medium (in print vs. on screen) and on the reading time-frame (free vs. pressured time). Readers' mindwandering while reading, prediction of performance on a comprehension test, and their text comprehension were measured. In-print readers, but not on-screen readers, mindwandered less on the pressured than in the free time condition, indicating higher task adaptation in print. Accordingly, on-screen readers in the pressured…

2014

The role of literal meaning during the construction of meaning that goes beyond pure literal composition was investigated by combining cross-modal masked priming and ERPs. This experimental design was chosen to compare two conflicting theoretical positions on this topic. The indirect access account claims that literal aspects are processed first, and additional meaning components are computed only if no satisfactory interpretation is reached. In contrast, the direct access approach argues that figurative aspects can be accessed immediately. We presented metaphors (These lawyers are hyenas, Experiment 1a & 1b) and producer-for-product metonymies (The boy read Boll, Experiment 2a & 2b) with a…

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INFERENTIAL PROCESSING AND TEXT PROCESSING: A DEVELOPMENTAL STUDY

2012

The research reported here was designed to investigate the critical role played by certain factors implicated in the mental representation of text, and to establish whether their role varies significantly as a function of developmental age. Specifically, it was decided to analyse, in a sample of 180 subjects was selected from three different age groups (7, 10 and 18 years of age respectively), the role of such factors in mediating and influencing the generation of the inferences needed to understand a piece of text characterised by a sequence of information which flows in a logical order, but leads to a conclusion which is contrary to the expectations evoked by the text. In line with this o…

The Relation Between Finnish Conscripts’ Reading Difficulties (Rd), Cognitive Abilities And The Length Of Service Period

2011

Abstract In this study, the existence of reading difficulties (RD) among young adults and the relation between RD, cognitive abilities and length of service period were examined. The aim was to study the manifestation of reading difficulties with young adult males, the connection between different cognitive abilities and reading comprehension and decoding skills, and to determine whether the membership of different reading skills groups was related to the length of the service period, which is partly dependent on the scores of cognitive assessment in military service, Basic Test 1. The participants in this study (N=1399) were Finnish adolescents (mean age 20 years, sd .61) participating in …

Using Internet videos to learn about controversies: Evaluation and integration of multiple and multimodal documents by primary school students

2020

Abstract In many Internet videos authors appear in front of the camera to present their particular view on a topic. Given the high consumption rate of Internet videos by teenagers, we explored the pros and cons of using these videos to learn about complex topics, compared to learning from textual web pages. Specifically, we studied how 207 primary school students (grades 4–6) evaluated and integrated multiple and multimodal web pages (text or video) while learning about the pros and cons of bottled water. Results showed no major role of modality in students' source memory, as measured by citations in their responses to an integration question and their memory for sources. Nevertheless, moda…

2021

Students with poor reading skills and reading difficulties (RDs) are at elevated risk for bullying involvement in elementary school, but it is not known whether they are at risk also later in adolescence. This study investigated the longitudinal interplay between reading skills (fluency and comprehension), victimization, and bullying across the transition from elementary to middle school, controlling for externalizing and internalizing problems. The sample consists of 1,824 students (47.3% girls, T1 mean age was 12 years 9 months) from 150 Grade 6 classrooms, whose reading fluency and comprehension, self-reported victimization and bullying, and self-reported externalizing and internalizing …

Technology for supporting web information search and learning in Sign Language

2009

Sign Languages (SL) are underrepresented in the digital world, which contributes to the digital divide for the Deaf Community. In this paper, our goal is twofold: (1) to review the implications of current SL generation technologies for two key user web tasks, information search and learning and (2) to propose a taxonomy of the technical and functional dimensions for categorizing those technologies. The review reveals that although contents can currently be portrayed in SL by means of videos of human signers or avatars, the debate about how bilingual (text and SL) versus SL-only websites affect signers' comprehension of hypertext content emerges as an unresolved issue in need of further empi…