The ability to express yourself concisely and coherently is a crucial skill, both for academic purposes and professional careers. An important aspect to consider in writing is an adequate segmentation of ideas, which in turn requires a proper understanding of where to place paragraph breaks. However, these decisions are often performed…

Artificial intelligence (AI) first made its entry into higher education in the form of paraphrasing tools. These tools were used to take passages that were copied from sources, and through various methods, disguised the original text to avoid academic integrity violations. At first, these tools were not very good and produced nearly…

To extend the existing research examining multiple text comprehension and its assessment, we developed a verification task approach to assessing of information that was "explicitly" and "implicitly" presented "within" and across nine texts. A nonparametric form of signal detection theory was used to analyse the…

This study focuses on differences in the scholarly search approaches of researchers and students in contemporary information environments by examining use of academic resources and elements in search results (such as title or abstract) to identify scholarly search knowledge and skills. To examine how users select documents for different search…

Structured Literacy (SL) approaches are often recommended for students with dyslexia and other poor decoders (e.g., International Dyslexia Association, 2017). Examples of SL approaches include the Wilson Reading System (Wilson, 1988), Orton-Gillingham (Gillingham & Stillman, 2014), the Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program (Lindamood &…

Research has identified a number of linguistic features that influence the reading comprehension of young readers; yet, less is known about whether and how these findings extend to adult readers. This study examines text comprehension, processing, and familiarity judgment provided by adult readers using a number of different approaches (i.e.,…

Reading comprehension is multidimensional and complex. The persistent challenges children, adolescents, and even adults face with reading comprehension call for concerted efforts to develop assessments that help identify sources of difficulties and to design instructional approaches to prevent or ameliorate these difficulties. Doing so requires…

Preliminary efficacy data are reported for a research-based reading intervention designed for struggling readers in high school. PHAST PACES teaches (a) word identification strategies, (b) knowledge of text structures, and (c) reading comprehension strategies. In a quasi-experimental design, 268 intervention and 83 waiting list control students…

This study examined the effectiveness of instruction in a genre-specific reading comprehension strategy, "Critical Analysis of Argumentative Text" (CAAT), which was designed to help students to identify, summarize and critically analyze parts of argumentative text. Based on the premise that reading and writing require similar knowledge of text…

One source of potential difficulty for struggling readers is the variability of texts across grade levels. This article explores the use of automatic natural language processing techniques to identify dimensions of variation within a corpus of school-appropriate texts. Specifically, we asked: Are there identifiable dimensions of lexical and…