Background: Research has suggested that background music can have a positive or negative effect that can influence the affective state of individuals. Although research has demonstrated that fear negatively influences our cognitive performance, there is a research gap in understanding the combined effects of different background music tempo and…

The current study examines the role of gender, socioeconomic status, and region in predicting the reading comprehension of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. Based on the relevant literature, three hypotheses have been formulated, which entail three independent variables (gender, socioeconomic status, and region) and the dependent…

While learners' evaluations of author trustworthiness have received much attention in prior research, less work has examined how students evaluate information within texts or engage in critique. Specifically, in this exploratory study, we sought to determine how effective higher education students were at engaging in research report critique, a…

The present study examined the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and comprehension on a multiple text assessment from the ACT test for college preparedness in which texts are available during question answering. Specifically, it was of interest whether differences in relations would be seen across different question types. Only…

The demands of learning in the twenty-first century require being skilled in the use and comprehension of multiple documents. Some individual factors such as the metacognitive skill of theory of mind (ToM) are related to this ability. This study investigated the relationship between university students' ability to comprehend multiple documents,…

This study used a correlational design and a path analytic approach to investigate direct and indirect relationships between strategic backtracking and integrated text understanding when undergraduates read a digital informational text on a tablet or a smartphone. In digital reading contexts, strategic backtracking involves that readers…

This study re-examines the role of working memory (WM) in aural/oral comprehension among English as a Foreign Language (EFL) college students, building upon previous research (Aldosari & Mekheimer, 2018). The investigation aims to determine the predictive relationship between working memory span and both reading and listening comprehension…

This study examined 57 learners' emotions (i.e., joy, anger, confusion, frustration) as they engaged with scientific content while learning about microbiology with Crystal Island, a game-based learning environment (GBLE). Measures of learners' prior knowledge, in-game text comprehension, facial expressions of emotion, and posttest reading…

In this study, I investigated the print exposure and website exposure of undergraduates in relation to their scores on a text comprehension test. Print exposure was measured with a national version of the author recognition test, whereas a new website recognition test was developed to measure students' exposure to texts on the internet. The…

Analyzing constructed responses, such as think-alouds or self-explanations, can reveal valuable information about readers' comprehension strategies. The current study expands on the extant work by (1) investigating combinations and patterns of comprehension strategies that readers use and (2) examining the extent to which these patterns relate to…

Analyzing constructed responses, such as think-alouds or self-explanations, can reveal valuable information about readers' comprehension strategies. The current study expands on the extant work by (1) investigating combinations and patterns of comprehension strategies that readers use and (2) examining the extent to which these patterns relate to…

Learners' monitoring judgments during reading are based on a variety of cues, and the roles of task features in promoting and constraining judgment accuracy are beginning to be understood. This work examined task and item characteristics influencing adults' monitoring of performance during reading and study tasks. In Study 1a, adults (N = 242)…

The deep cloze test was developed by Jensen and Elbro (Read Writ Interdiscip J 35(5):1221-1237, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-021-10230-w) to assess reading comprehension at the level of global situational understanding. In two independent studies, we examined potential contributors to students' scores on the deep cloze reading…

Disengaged responding poses a severe threat to the validity of educational large-scale assessments, because item responses from unmotivated test-takers do not reflect their actual ability. Existing identification approaches rely primarily on item response times, which bears the risk of misclassifying fast engaged or slow disengaged responses.…

The purpose of this paper is to (a) establish whether meaning recall and meaning recognition item formats test psychometrically distinct constructs of vocabulary knowledge which measure separate skills, and, if so, (b) determine whether each construct possesses unique properties predictive of L2 reading proficiency. Factor analyses and…