Arabic orthography is mainly presented either in shallow orthography (with all diacritics) for novice students or in deep orthography (without diacritics) for superior readers. However, the shallow orthography is heavily loaded with diacritics which may burden the reading process, whereas deep orthography can cause ambiguity (heterophonic…

Students with specific learning disabilities (SLD) represent between 5% and 10% of the total number of students in public schools in Saudi Arabia (Abu Nayyan, 2015). Further, 80-90% of students with SLD exhibit reading difficulties including difficulties in reading comprehension (Mercer & Pullen, 2009). Although there is a large number of…

The ability to read in a second language (L2) for academic purposes is essential for higher education students. Dutch colleges increasingly use materials in English or teach in English. This can be challenging for L2 readers, especially students entering higher education from vocational studies, who may have less experience with L2 academic…

Socioeconomic status (SES)-related language gaps are known to widen throughout the course of the school years; however, not all children from lower SES homes perform worse than their higher SES peers on measures of language. The current study uses mediation and moderated mediation to examine how cognitive and language abilities (vocabulary,…

Reading literacy is the core component of Chinese literacy and the basic ability needed in students' personal development. From the experience of international curriculum and teaching reform, project-based learning is an important way to train students' core literacy. In this context, this paper explores the impact of project-based learning on…

New forms of visualizations are transforming how people interact with data. This dissertation explored how undergraduates learn with infographics. The following questions guided this research: (i) What do we know about the factors influencing the processing of data visualizations? (ii) How do task-level and learner-level characteristics impact the…

OpenCourseWare (OCW) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have gained increasing popularity and importance because they greatly expand students' access to university lectures. Although the main component of OCW and MOOC platforms is lectures, their differences may potentially affect the difficulty of academic listening comprehension. This study…

Reading is a complicated cognitive procedure of deciphering symbols to create meaning. It's a complicated relationship that the reader has with the text and is lead by a reader's previous knowledge, experiences, attitude, and culture. Second language (L2) reading comprehension is perhaps a more complicated procedure and there's a need to ensure…

Numerous studies suggest that children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) encounter language problems related to syntax. In particular, these children face difficulties in comprehending and answering complex language structures in Arabic. This paper examines whether a prototype Arabic assistive application can have an impact on the ability of…

Recent research seeks to develop more comprehensive learner models for adaptive learning software. For example, models of reading comprehension built using data from students' use of adaptive instructional software for mathematics have recently been developed. These models aim to deliver experiences that consider factors related to learning beyond…

Reading and understanding scientific literature is an essential skill for any scientist to learn. While students' scientific literacy can be improved by reading research articles, an article's technical language and structure can hinder students' understanding of the scientific material. Furthermore, many students struggle with interpreting graphs…

David Stephens, a 4th grade teacher in Washington State, was preparing a lesson plan about desert wildlife (all names are pseudonyms). He was planning on assigning his students the chapter book, "Desert Giant: The World of the Saguaro Cactus." The students had divergent knowledge about the topic. For example, Maryam had grown up in…

In the present study, we compared the extent to which linguistic comprehension (vocabulary and listening comprehension) and word reading explain reading comprehension differentially for English learners (ELs) and non-ELs with reading difficulties. We also investigated whether different mechanisms of reading comprehension failure exist for each…

This study presents longitudinal data analysis of 6 years of reading scores on a large-scale statewide performance-based alternate assessment for 214 students who are deaf/hard of hearing and have an additional cognitive disability. Assessment scores were examined by complexity level, within grade-level bands, and individually over time. Results…

This study aims to explore early reading comprehension in Chinese-speaking children with hearing loss (HL) by examining character recognition and linguistic comprehension. Twenty-five children with HL received three measures relevant to character reading: phonological awareness (PA), morphological awareness (MA), and character recognition; two…