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…

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…

Connectives such as "because" and "but" are crucial for signaling coherence relations in discourse. They contribute to a better reading comprehension and, thus, academic performance. The aim of this article is to contribute to our understanding of connective development during teenage years by studying individual differences in…

Successful text comprehension requires readers to engage in a number of coherence-building processes. This study examined how analyzing the cohesion of students 'constructed responses can be used to evaluate these coherence-building processes and the extent to which they vary across readers' individual differences and across types of texts. We…

This longitudinal study investigated development of second language (L2) reading comprehension ability and predictive contributions of five L2 reading components (word recognition speed, listening comprehension, vocabulary breadth, grammar knowledge and first language [L1] reading comprehension) using latent growth curve modelling. The…

Conjunctions facilitate text cohesion and comprehension by making explicit the logical relationships between ideas in written language. Conjunctions may be challenging for English language learners (ELLs) because of their novel, abstract, and text-connecting role. In this longitudinal study we aimed to clarify the connections among comprehension…

The inference mediation hypothesis (IMH) assumes that individual difference factors that affect reading proficiency have direct and indirect effects on comprehension outcomes, with the indirect effects involving inference processes. The present study tested the IMH in a diverse sample of two and four-year college students in a task that emphasizes…

Readers read for different purposes and the texts they read vary in topic and difficulty. These situational factors influence standards of coherence--how much understanding a reader aims to have for a given text. Three studies examined whether individual differences in reader-based standards of coherence influenced off-line and on-line…

Scientific reasoning is an important skill that encompasses hypothesizing, experimenting, inferencing, evaluating data and drawing conclusions. Previous research found consistent inter- and intra-individual differences in children's ability to perform these component skills, which are still largely unaccounted for. This study examined these…

The present study aims to provide a systematic understanding of how perspective-taking ability contributes to primary-school students' cooperative behaviours and learning outcomes. The present study is frontline as we combined person-oriented (e.g., describing patterns of behaviours based on individual characteristics), process-oriented (e.g.,…

Understanding text in a second language can be particularly challenging. The authors explored the contribution of morphological awareness in children's first and second languages to development in second-language reading comprehension. Critically, the authors examined the role of a skill that might be at the heart of these cross-linguistic…

Test-taker characteristics (TTCs), or individual difference variables, are known to be a systematic source of variance in language test performance. Although previous research has documented the impact of a range of TTCs on second language (L2) learners' test performance, few of these studies have involved young learners. Given that young L2…

We investigated the contribution of morphological awareness to university students' reading comprehension ability. Although there is considerable evidence that morphological awareness contributes to children's reading ability, there is much less evidence concerning adults; the few studies of adults have not controlled other known predictors of…

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…