Background: Internet documents are characterised by their non-linear hyperlink structure, which allows for more flexible reading, at the cost of higher cognitive loads. Linear text reading comprehension skills contribute to hypertext comprehension (either directly or through its impact on navigation behaviours) but cannot fully account for its…

In educational settings, students read for multiple purposes, such as preparing for an exam, practicing a new reading strategy, writing an essay, and more. Because reading is a goal-directed activity, providing students with task instructions can help them create goals for reading and develop a plan to meet these goals. In the current experiment,…

Virtual Reality (VR) has gained popularity in educational fields enabling new learning possibilities. In the implementation process, VR could improve learning by increasing positive affective and cognitive processing, whereas VR also could hurt learning by increasing distraction and leading to poorer learning outcomes. Thus, understanding the…

The purpose of this study was to examine clusters of less-skilled college readers. College students with below average reading comprehension skills (N = 77) read and thought aloud about four texts, recalled the texts, and completed standardized assessments of reading skills. Based on the findings of cluster analyses of the cognitive processes…

Embodied cognition and movement-integration (MI) in classroom settings attract the interest of researchers and practitioners. The purpose of this six-week pilot study was to investigate the feasibility and acceptability of a MI approach (PunMoves) focusing on the comprehension of punctuation marks in reading, which was implemented in 12…

Reading outcomes at a national level have remained stagnant for more than two decades. One reason why is that the field has struggled with how to address poor reading comprehension when reading words is not the problem. Another is that limited insight into the causes of poor comprehension performance is offered by traditional reading comprehension…

Background: In the digital environment, users' academic reading behaviour has changed, working with many articles simultaneously to search, filter, scan, link, annotate and analyse content fragments. The semantic enhancement environment has been widely set with semantic technologies to offer additional and handy support for users and thus…

Segmentation is a cornerstone of language processing across levels of linguistic analysis, and yet, standard models of linguistic memory leave the role of higher-order segments in online comprehension understudied. This dissertation advances the Context-Sensitive Encoding (CSE) hypothesis: that implicit prosodic boundaries (Bader, 1998; J. Fodor,…

Background: Collaborative reading can facilitate students' understanding of complex learning materials. High-quality annotations provided by peer learners are essential for successful collaborative reading. However, it remains to be understood how annotation quality affects reading comprehension. Objectives: A simulated collaborative reading…

The purpose of this study was to examine clusters of less-skilled college readers. College students with below average reading comprehension skills (N = 77) read and thought aloud about four texts, recalled the texts, and completed standardized assessments of reading skills. Based on the findings of cluster analyses of the cognitive processes…

Despite the recognized link between scientific reasoning, mental sets, and conceptual change, the cognitive mechanisms underlying successful conceptual change remain unclear. To explore this, we developed computer-based reasoning programs with and without mental set support to examine their effects on conceptual change in tasks of varying…

Reading texts can prompt intense emotions, and these emotions profoundly influence learning from texts. I first discuss the findings from the eight studies reported in this special issue. The studies represent pivotal advances in research on reading. Focusing on learning from science texts, they show that different emotions and different types of…

Reading, like all areas of human learning, is complex and multidimensional. Educational psychology has an opportunity to contribute further to a science of reading, and potentially to a science of reading instruction, by expanding its traditional theoretical and methodological orientations to embrace this complexity. Topics central to this effort…

This study used eye-movement tracking to investigate how students engage with the learning process of reading science articles with or without hands-on manipulation of a pulley system and their influences on learning outcomes. This experiment used a 2 (reading easy or difficult articles) × 2 (with or without hands-on manipulation) between-subject…

Reading literacy is a multidimensional construct in terms of text and reading processes. Much research has examined the divisibility of the processes underlying reading, but they have treated the rest of the construct as unitary. This study extends the examination of dimensionality to a neglected area in literacy studies. It tests reading models…