Gifted underachievers perform worse in school than would be expected based on their high intelligence. Possible causes for underachievement are low motivational dispositions (need for cognition) and metacognitive competences. This study tested the interplay of these variables longitudinally with gifted and non-gifted students from Germany…

Reading comprehension is an essential skill for learning in general and in science classes. Problems with reading comprehension might hinder students' participation in learning science. Text in science includes specific language features that distinguishes it from narrative text, so should reading instruction be part of teaching science? The…

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.…

Purpose: The transition to school and the first years of elementary school education are very sensitive phases for reading development. Reading researchers have established key precursors and developmental steps in these phases. However, how these components interact and affect growth is not well understood yet. The current study from Germany…

Reading self-concept is an important predictor of reading comprehension and vice versa. However, the mechanisms that are at work in this relation have yet to be identified. In line with the self-enhancement approach, we propose that in the reading domain, amount of reading, book choice (text difficulty and book length), and intrinsic reading…

Previous studies mostly examined the role of orthographic knowledge in basic reading processing (i.e., word-reading), however, regarding higher reading processing (i.e., sentence- and text-comprehension), mixed results were reported. In addition, previous research in transparent languages, such as German, focused mostly on typically skilled…

In this study, we investigated developmental aspects of eye movements during reading of three languages (English, German, and Finnish) that vary widely in their orthographic complexity and predictability. Grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules are rather complex in English and German but relatively simple in Finnish. Despite their differences in…

Efficiency in reading component skills is crucial for reading comprehension, as efficient subprocesses do not extensively consume limited cognitive resources, making them available for comprehension processes. Cognitive efficiency is typically measured with speeded tests of relatively easy items. Observed responses and response times indicate the…

Background: In the present paper, we investigated the association between time spent reading and reading comprehension throughout the lifespan. According to the Matthew effect (or rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer) model, interindividual differences in reading-related skills between poor and average readers become wider as individuals grow…

Phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), letter knowledge, and oral language are all significant predictors of successful literacy acquisition in several languages. However, their relative importance is less clear and depends on language characteristics, the specific aspect of literacy assessed, and the phase of literacy…

Placement and screening tests serve important functions, not only with regard to placing learners at appropriate levels of language courses but also with a view to maximizing the effectiveness of administering test batteries. We examined two widely reported formats suitable for these purposes, the discrete decontextualized Yes/No vocabulary test…

Receptive foreign language proficiency is usually measured with reading and listening comprehension tasks. A novel approach to assess such proficiencies--viewing comprehension--is based on the presentation of short instructional videos followed by one or more comprehension questions concerning the preceding video stimulus. In order to evaluate a…

Uses preschool tests of general verbal ability, verbal memory span, phonological awareness, lexical access speed and accuracy, and letter knowledge in preschool as independent measures predicting performance on second-grade reading comprehension, word discrimination, and word decoding speed. Finds differential main effects and interactions but a…

The present work examined the influence of topic interest on the strength of different components of text representation and long-term retention according to the model of text processing by van Dijk and Kintsch (1983). A Series of relevant personality characteristics were assessed to control for alternative explanations of interest effect, A total…