Purpose: Many PhD students have strong reading comprehension, but some struggle with how to read critically. The purpose of this study is to understand what reading looks like for PhD students, what they are doing when they read scholarly texts and how they bring these texts to life in meaningful ways. Design/methodology/approach: The authors…

This study investigates how working memory (WM) capacity and L2 linguistic knowledge affect L2 literal and inferential reading comprehension, considering the presence or absence of background knowledge. Eighty upper-intermediate to advanced adult English learners participated, completing tasks to assess WM capacity, background knowledge, L2…

Reading comprehension and writing are essential skills for success in modern societies. Additionally, reading and writing have been described as highly reflective activities that necessitate metacognitive monitoring and control. However, reading comprehension and writing are skills moderated by many factors, proficiency among them. Thus, in the…

When a situation could lead to multiple mutually exclusive consequences, recent research shows that people automatically generate multiple predictive inferences in memory. Several theoretical mechanisms have been proposed to account for the generation of predictive inferences. One hypothesis is that inferences are minimally encoded, represented…

When displaying text on a page or a screen, only a finite number of characters can be presented on a single line. If the text exceeds that finite value, then text wrapping occurs. Often this process results in longer, more difficult to process words being positioned at the start of a line. We conducted an eye movement study to examine how this…

Aim/Purpose: In undergraduate training, helping students improve argumentative text comprehension (CoT) by identifying the elements of an argumentative text and critical thinking (CT) by reconstructing the meaning of the text and constructing their own reflections is relevant. Argumentative skills are essential on both the personal and…

National reading data indicate that students with intellectual disabilities (ID) fall behind their peers in reading. Reading is important for academic achievement and learning to read can increase independence in several settings including school, work, home, and community or social (Wilson & Hunter, 2010). Students with ID have historically…

Engaging in explanation while studying expository science texts can improve comprehension. The present study varied the timing of explanation activities and restudy opportunities before taking final comprehension tests on a set of 6 topics studied as part of a course in Introduction to Psychology. When students had the opportunity to restudy in…

The problem addressed in this qualitative case study was that teachers in Title 1 schools often struggle to provide the support needed by students to meet the required reading comprehension levels. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine the perceptions of literacy coaches and general education teachers regarding the…

Studies have found that metacomprehension accuracy tends to be poor, but there has also been evidence that rereading a text may improve metacomprehension accuracy. One explanation for this rereading effect is that readers can attend more to the metacognitive level during rereading than the initial reading. However, prior experiments used paradigms…

Over the past several years, the need for identification and implementation of effective reading comprehension strategies for students diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has come to the forefront of educational research, especially as the prevalence of this population continues to rise. It has been well documented, a large percentage of…

Background: The idea that screens 'stole children's focus' and that reading books, in contrast, stimulates selective attention is theoretically complex and has largely been ignored in empirical tests. Research has identified positive associations between reading habits and various dimensions of attention in children, but most research is…

This study examined the psychometric properties of two common frameworks for scoring retell data (i.e., clause- and idea unit-based methods) among 86 third- through fifth-grade students with dyslexia. At the beginning and end of the school year, students read two grade-level R-CBM probes (one orally and one silently) and engaged in a retell…

The present study examined how argument type (science based vs. personal case based), belief consistency (belief consistent vs. inconsistent) and reading goals (read to evaluate vs. read to learn) influence comprehension and trustworthiness evaluations for claim-conflicting multiple texts. Undergraduates read four conflicting texts about the…

Background: A common approach to assessing students' integrated understanding of multiple documents is to analyse their post-reading written reports. This study investigated to what extent writing self-efficacy directly and indirectly (via integrative processing) contributed to multiple-document comprehension as assessed with an integrative…