Search results for "Reading comprehension"
showing 10 items of 170 documents
Selecting students for medical school: What predicts success during basic science studies? A cognitive approach
1996
This study focuses on differences between multiple-choice science tests and a learning-from-text (LFT) test, and how these tests predict success in basic medical studies. The subjects (N = 503) were applicants to the Helsinki University Medical Faculty. All of them had to take an entrance examination in order to be considered for admission to a 6-year study programme combining medical school and graduate studies. The entrance examination consisted of three traditional multiple-choice science tests and one LFT test, the latter designed to measure deep-level processing of text. A follow-up study was conducted in order to see how the different tasks were related to the grades and pace of study…
Literacy programs efficacy for developing children’s early reading skills in familiar language in Zambia
2018
This study investigated the comparative efficacy of a phonics-based reading program and a language experience approach based literacy program to develop reading skills among Zambian early childhood school learners. The learners (n = 1 986; Grade 2 level; females = 50.1%) took either the phonics-based reading program (n = 1 593) or the alternative language experience approach based program (n = 393). They were all assessed for reading skills utilising the Early Grade Reading Assessment test (EGRA) in four languages (Cinyanja, Icibemba, Kiikaonde, and Silozi). Results suggest that learners in phonics-based literacy program were significantly better in letter-sound knowledge in all the four la…
Preditores de compreensão de leitura em adultos Europeus
2021
Research on the predictors of reading comprehension has been largely focused on school-aged children and mainly in opaque orthographies, hindering the generalization of the results to adult populations and more transparent orthographies. In the present study, we aim to test two versions of the Simple View of Reading (SVR): the original model and an extended version, including reading fluency and vocabulary. Additional mediation models were analyzed to verify if other reading comprehension predictors (rapid automatized naming, phonological decoding, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and working memory) have direct effects or if they are mediated through word reading and readin…
Cognitive and non-cognitive factors in educational and occupational outcomes-Specific to reading disability?
2020
Low education and unemployment are common adult-age outcomes associated with childhood RD (c-RD). However, adult-age cognitive and non-cognitive factors associated with different outcomes remain unknown. We studied whether these outcomes are equally common among individuals with c-RD and controls and whether these outcomes are related to adult-age literacy skills or cognitive and non-cognitive factors or their interaction with c-RD. We examined adult participants with c-RD (n = 48) and their matched controls (n = 37). Low education was more common among c-RD than the controls, whereas long-term unemployment was equally common in both groups. Moreover, adult-age literacy skills, cognitive sk…
Easy-to-read Texts for Students with Intellectual Disability: Linguistic Factors Affecting Comprehension
2013
Background: The use of ‘easy-to-read’ materials for people with intellectual disabilities has become very widespread but their effectiveness has scarcely been evaluated. In this study, the framework provided by Kintsch's Construction–Integration Model (1988) is used to examine (i) the reading comprehension levels of different passages of the Spanish text that have been designed following easy-to-read guidelines and (ii) the relationships between reading comprehension (literal and inferential) and various linguistic features of these texts. Method: Sixteen students with mild intellectual disability and low levels of reading skills were asked to read easy-to-read texts and then complete a rea…
Interventions to Improve Health among Reproductive-Age Women of Low Health Literacy: A Systematic Review
2020
Background: Limited or low health literacy (HL) has been associated with poor health outcomes, including inadequate self-caring and preventive behaviors. A few studies have systematically summarized the effect of interventions to improve reproductive health and care in women with insufficient HL. The main objective of the study was to investigate health care promotion interventions and examine their effectiveness on women with inadequate HL through a systematic review of randomized controlled trials (RCT). Methods: RCTs and quasi-experimental studies that assessed HL interventions to improve reproductive health of women with low HL were included. The study protocol was registered with PROSP…
The effectiveness of compositional animation design: Evidence from eye tracking
2017
Communication donnée le 1er septembre 2017 lors du symposium : Eye tracking as a method in learning and testing with different representations(session L 8); International audience; Learners have difficulty in decomposing conventionally designed animations to obtain raw material suitable for building high quality mental models. A composition approach to designing animations based on the Animation Processing Model was developed as a principled alternative to prevailing approaches. It provides learners with pre-decomposed material that is structured and sequenced to facilitate the relation building required for effective mental model construction. Study of a compositional animation that presen…
Sylvén, L. K. (2019). Investigating Content and Language Integrated Learning. Insights from Swedish High Schools. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters
2019
This volume presents a three-year research project on Content and Language Integration in Swedish Schools (CLISS). CLISS particularly focused on sciences and economics programs in senior high schools (Grades 10-12; 245 participants), which intended to prepare students for higher education. Divided into five sections, the book explores the language, rather than content, side of CLIL. The volume starts with background information concerning CLISS and CLIL in Sweden. The following four sections of the book concern assessment and motivation (Chapters 4-5); English vocabulary, reading comprehension and exposure to English (Chapters 6-9); students’ L1 proficiency and development through CLIL (Cha…
Prediction of the difficulty level in a standardized reading comprehension test: contributions from cognitive psychology and psychometrics
2013
This research seeks to identify possible predictors of the difficulty level of reading comprehension items used in a standardized psychometric test for university admission. Several potential predictors of difficulty were proposed, namely, propositional density, negations, grammatical structure, vocabulary difficulty, presence of enhancement elements (words highlighted typographically), item abstraction level and degree of similarity between correct option and relevant text to resolve the item. By Linear Logistic Test Model (Fisher, 1973) it was found that the number of propositions, the syntactic structure, and fundamentally, the presence of difficult words contributed to the prediction of…
Understanding and Integrating Multiple Science Texts: Summary Tasks are Sometimes Better Than Argument Tasks
2010
One of the major challenges of a knowledge society is that students as well as other citizens must learn to understand and integrate information from multiple textual sources. Still, task and reader characteristics that may facilitate or constrain such intertextual processes are not well understood by researchers. In this study, we compare the effects of summary and argument essay tasks when undergraduates read seven different texts on a particular scientific topic, finding that an instruction to write summaries may lead to better understanding and integration than an instruction to write argument essays. We discuss several possible explanations for this result. We also found that beliefs a…