Differences in cognitive and metacognitive processing patterns as a function of working-memory capacity and reading for different purposes were examined in college-aged readers by collecting reading times and calculating absolute monitoring accuracy, which is the difference between estimated and actual comprehension test performance. Readers read…

Social cognitive research has linked students' perceived academic capabilities, or self-efficacy, to academic choices, self-regulation, and performance in diverse contexts from reading comprehension to mathematical problem solving. This study addressed a need to investigate the interactions among prior achievement, self-efficacy, calibration (the…

Providers of tests of languages for academic purposes generally claim to provide evidence on the extent to which students are likely to be able to cope with the future demands of reading in specified real-life contexts. Such claims need to be supported by evidence that the texts employed in the test reflect salient features of the texts the test…

Individuals with autism frequently show impairments in text reading comprehension. This often is attributed to poor ability to draw inferences during reading and to inadequate access to relevant knowledge. The current study tested this hypothesis by measuring the time taken to read the same question, relating to either physical or social world…

This research sought to add to a body of knowledge that is severely underrepresented in the scientific literature, reading comprehension in secondary students. Chapter 1 examines the current state of literacy in the nation's public schools and the consequences that arise if students leave high school with inadequate reading skills. It discusses…

Emerging research supports the contribution of executive function (EF) to reading comprehension; however, a unique pattern has not been established for children who demonstrate comprehension difficulties despite average word recognition ability (specific reading comprehension deficit; S-RCD). To identify particular EF components on which children…

The present study explores the impact of an experimental reading intervention focusing on explicit reading strategy instruction and cross-age peer tutoring on third and sixth graders' reading strategy awareness, cognitive and metacognitive reading strategy use, and reading comprehension achievement. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design was…

This article explains a viable, researched, teaching activity that I call Treasure Hunt. Treasure Hunt is an oral participation, vocabulary lesson that facilitates the transfer of reading comprehension to silent reading. I designed and used this activity with adolescent, challenged readers. The readers had scored below the 70th percentile on a…

In this article we present results of a Differential Item Functioning (DIF) study using Shealy and Stout's (1993) multidimensionality-based DIF analysis framework. In this framework, differences in test score distributions across different groups of examinees may be a result of multidimensionality if secondary dimensions (not the primary dimension…

This study investigates the relationship between oral proficiency and reading proficiency in English-learning children (L2 students) and native English-speaking children (NE students). A set of oral activities measuring students' academic oral skills in science classes was developed and administered to 61 fourth graders. Both the meaning-related…

Interest in students who exhibit characteristics with difficulties in learning can be traced as far back as 1800. In order to better understand the complexities and causes of learning disabilities, many researchers (Bannatyne, 1968, 1974; Rugal, 1974) have investigated ways to better identify learners who struggle with academics. A strong argument…

Language comprehension occurs when the left-hemisphere (LH) and the right-hemisphere (RH) share information derived from discourse [Beeman, M. J., Bowden, E. M., & Gernsbacher, M. A. (2000). Right and left hemisphere cooperation for drawing predictive and coherence inferences during normal story comprehension. "Brain and Language, 71", 310-336].…

This study examined the relationships of 3 levels of reading fluency--the individual word, the syntactic unit, and the whole passage--to reading comprehension among 278 5th graders heterogeneous in reading ability. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that reading fluency at each level related uniquely to performance on a standardized reading…

In her thoughtful work regarding various aspects of emotion and emotion related words, Pavlenko explores a variety of perspectives on how we might characterize and conceptualize expressions of emotion. It is a work that is quite rich in breadth--one that leads to a variety of different thoughts on this topic, many of which are amenable to…

This article reports on a study that examined the choice and use of academic reading strategies of adult learners who were identified as proficient and less proficient readers. The major objective was to explore the potential influence of their adult characteristics on their use of their academic reading strategies. Data were gathered using…