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…

Poorer adolescent readers are often regarded by teachers as unable to read whole narratives and given short, simplified texts, yet are expected to analyse every part in a slow laborious read-through. This article reports on a mixed methods study in which 20 English teachers in the South of England changed their current practice to read two whole…

Background and aims: The purpose of the current exploratory study was to describe the inferential narrative comprehension skills of young school-age children on the autism spectrum who, as a group, are at high risk of significant and persistent reading comprehension difficulties. Our aim was to investigate whether the anticipated difficulties in…

Inference skill is one of the most important predictors of reading comprehension. Still, there is little rigorous research investigating the effects of inference instruction on reading comprehension. There is no research investigating the effects of inference instruction on reading comprehension for English learners with reading comprehension…

This study investigated direct and indirect effects of executive functions on reading comprehension in adolescents (N = 87, M = 14.0 years, SD = 1.5) by testing for parallel mediation of effects of working memory, task-switching, and inhibitory control via decoding and text recall/inference. Working memory showed direct and indirect effects on…

This demonstration introduces and presents an innovative online cognitive diagnostic assessment, developed to identify the types of cognitive processes that readers use during comprehension; specifically, processes that distinguish between subtypes of struggling comprehenders. Cognitive diagnostic assessments are designed to provide valuable…

This article engages with recent policy on reading comprehension. It argues that the construct of inference has been treated as a single entity despite research and literature to the contrary, and this is perpetuated in the National Curriculum for 2014. It explores the limitations of conceptualising inference as a unitary construct and…

Skill in generating inferences predicts reading comprehension for students in the elementary and intermediate grades even after taking into account word reading, vocabulary knowledge, and cognitive ability (Cain et al., "Journal of Educational Psychology, 96," 671-81, 2004; Kendeou et al., "Journal of Research in Reading, 31,"…

Skill in generating inferences predicts reading comprehension for students in the elementary and intermediate grades even after taking into account word reading, vocabulary knowledge, and cognitive ability (Cain et al., "Journal of Educational Psychology, 96," 671-81, 2004; Kendeou et al., "Journal of Research in Reading," 31,…

Within the framework of foreign language teaching and learning, reading strategies, depth of vocabulary knowledge and text inferencing skills have not been researched extensively. This study tries to fill this gap by analyzing the effects of reading strategies used by Turkish EFL learners and their depth of vocabulary knowledge on their text…

This study explored the relationship between the reading ability and science achievement of students in grades 5, 8, and 9. Reading ability was assessed with four measures: word recognition, vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, and comprehension (23% of all passages were on science topics). Science achievement was assessed with state…

Comprehension emerges as the results of inference and strategic processes that support the construction of a coherent mental model for a text. However, the vast majority of comprehension skills tests adopt a format that does not afford an assessment of these processes as they operate during reading. This study assessed the viability of the Reading…

The incorporation of various textual resources into scientific inquiry is important for establishing background knowledge. Many of these resources are now presented in hypertext or hypermedia environments, which require students to comprehend and actively integrate information from multiple sources. Further, numerous practices employed by readers…

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…

To examine the second-language reading development of 45 fourth-grade Latino bilinguals, a sequential mixed methods study was conducted in two phases (Creswell, 2009). The quantitative data collected in the first phase generated an index of the group's reading performance based on two grade-level assessments, a state-mandated standardized reading…