Search results for "Comprehension"
showing 10 items of 475 documents
Exploring the Secret of Finnish Reading Literacy Achievement
1993
Abstract The article describes and analyzes the main findings of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) Reading Literacy Study in Finland. The initial analyses indicate that in the international comparison the Finnish students had the highest literacy levels at both 9 and 14 years of age among the 31 participating nations. Possible explanations for the high scores are suggested and discussed from both Nordic and national points of view. In order to relate the reading performance not only internationally but also to the previous assessments, the results on some subtests are compared with the corresponding tests in the 1970 IEA reading comprehension …
Special Education Teachers’ Identification of Students’ Reading Difficulties in Grade 6
2020
his study investigated special educational needs (SEN) teachers’ (n = 29) assessment practices and the accuracy of their ratings of the students’ (M age = 12.75 years, n = 55) skill levels in reading fluency and reading comprehension. Teachers rated their sixth grade students’ fluency and comprehension on a three-point scale, and the students were also tested in group tests. Results showed that SEN teachers used several assessment practices simultaneously but mostly relied on observations. The correlations between the teacher ratings and the test scores were significant but moderate in fluency and weak in comprehension. Only two thirds of low-performing students having difficulties in fluen…
Reading Skills, Social Competence, and Physiological Stress in the First Grade
2021
AbstractAn awareness of school-related antecedents of children’s physiological stress at the beginning of school helps educators to prevent and mitigate children’s stress, the one of the major obstacles to their well-being and academic progress. We aimed to study the effect of reading skills and social competence on first-grade students’ salivary cortisol levels in natural settings. Based on previous results of the effects of everyday situations on children’s stress according to gender, we expected that both academic and social skills would affect girls’ physiological stress more, compared to boys. Our sample consisted of 277 students (7–8 years old, 50.2% girls). We used the highest saliva…
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.,…
Externalizing behavior problems and interest in reading as predictors of later reading skills and educational aspirations
2017
This study examined the developments in children’s externalizing problems and interest in reading during their first four years of school (Grades 1–4) and investigated whether this development predicted the children’s Grade 6 reading skills and educational aspirations. Data comprised (1) teachers’ ratings of externalizing problems and children’s (N = 642; 43% girls) self-ratings of their interest in reading, collected between Grades 1 and 4, and (2) measures of reading fluency and comprehension, and children’s self-reports of educational aspirations, collected at Grade 6. First, latent growth modeling showed that a higher level of externalizing problems in Grade 1 was associated with a lowe…
Gesture’s body orientation modulates the N400 during semantic integration of gesture and visual sentence
2020
AbstractBody orientation of gesture entails social-communicative intention, and may thus influence how gestures are perceived and comprehended together with auditory speech during face-to-face communication. To date, despite the emergence of neuroscientific literature on the role of body orientation on hand action perception, limited studies have directly investigated the role of body orientation in the interaction between gesture and language. To address this research question, we carried out an EEG experiment presenting to participants (n=21) videos of frontal and lateral hand gestures of five-seconds (e.g., raising a hand), followed by visually presented sentences that are either congrue…
Detecting impaired language processing in patients with mild cognitive impairment using around‐the‐ear cEEgrid electrodes
2021
Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is the term used to identify those individuals with subjective and objective cognitive decline but with preserved activities of daily living and an absence of dementia. Although MCI can impact functioning in different cognitive domains, most notably episodic memory, relatively little is known about the comprehension of language in MCI. In this study, we used around-the-ear electrodes (cEEGrids) to identify impairments during language comprehension in patients with MCI. In a group of 23 patients with MCI and 23 age-matched controls, language comprehension was tested in a two-word phrase paradigm. We examined the oscillatory changes following word onset as a fu…
The crisis of psychiatry – insights and prospects from evolutionary theory
2012
Darwin’s emphasis on natural selection has had a transformative influence on how biological and medical sciences are conceptualized and conducted. However, the relevance of his ideas for the understanding of psychiatric conditions is still under-appreciated. Modern understanding of disease has required appreciation of the dialectical give and take between environmental influences, life history theory imperatives, human behavioral ecology, and characteristics of adaptive processes at all levels of the individual. This has enabled a better comprehension of metabolic disturbances, cancers, auto-immune disease, inherited anemias, and vulnerability to infectious disease 1. Here we propose that a…
Parental informed consent in pediatric cancer trials: A population-based survey in Germany
2012
In Germany, nearly every child afflicted by a malignant dis-ease or a central nervous system tumor is enrolled in a clinicaltrial during treatment. Many of these children are under the age of5 years when they are first diagnosed [1]. The decision whether ornot to participate in a clinical trial is normally made by theparents on behalf of their child. Therefore, ensuring adequatelyinformed parental consent is essential to ethical practice in pedi-atric oncology.However, many empirical studies have revealed difficultieswith the informed consent process when parents are faced withthe decision to enroll their child in a clinical trial. Previous studyfindings have indicated that recalling signing th…
An automatic system for helping health consumers to understand medical texts
2015
Medical texts (reports, articles, etc.) are usually written by professionals (physicians, medical researchers, etc.) who use their own language and communication style. On the other hand, these texts are often read by health consumers (as in the case of medical reports) who do not have the same skills and vocabularies of the experts and can have difficulties in text comprehension. To help a health consumer in understanding a medical text, it would be desirable to have an automatic system that, given a text written with medical (technical) terms, translates them in simple or plain language and provides additional information with the same kind of language. We have designed such a system. It …