Education Commons^™

The Impact Of Guided Doodle Note-Taking On Reading Comprehension: A Quasi-Experimental Study, Kayla L. Dewald

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this quasi-experimental nonequivalent control-group study is to determine the impact of guided doodle note-taking strategies on middle school students’ reading comprehension. The importance of this study is the impact the data makes on the best practices of teacher instruction. The sample size is 101 students set in a city district in the Southeast United States. The students vary in socioeconomic levels, with many of them falling below the poverty line and representing a wide variety of ethnicities and races. Data was collected using pre- and post-test practices. The instrument utilized was the Reading Comprehension Scale. Data were …

Recommendations For Solving The Problem Of Low Sixth-Grade Comprehension Proficiency Scores At Hermitage Middle School In Hermitage, Missouri, Shannon Beers

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this study was to provide recommendations to solve the problem of sixth-grade below-proficient reading comprehension scores at Hermitage Middle School in Hermitage, Missouri. The problem was that 60% of the sixth-grade students at Hermitage Middle School could not comprehend grade-level text. The rationale for this research was that it is vital to ameliorate the reading comprehension scores of students since improvements may lead to greater grade-level and post-secondary readiness and an increase in school reputation, accreditation, and enrollment. The central research was, How can the problem of sixth-grade below-proficient reading comprehension be solved at Hermitage Middle School …

Improving Reading Comprehension For Struggling Middle School Readers, Amber Kaye Vermeer

Master's Theses & Capstone Projects

This action research was driven by the researcher’s interest in improving struggling reading students at the middle school level through a reading intervention course. The researcher used quantitative data through FastBridge CompEfficency to monitor the nine-week reading intervention course and evaluate students' progress weekly. The areas addressed in the intervention are reading comprehension skills of paraphrasing, main idea identification, summarizing, and inferencing. The researcher is a seventh-grade teacher in her sixth year of teaching reading classes and two reading intervention courses. The findings of the research showed that a few students were able to improve their reading skills and achieve …

Situative Black Girlhood Reading Motivations: Why And How Black Girls Read And Comprehend Text, Sara Jones

Faculty Publications - College of Education

This study aims to illustrate the complex relationships between reading motivation and reading comprehension for Black girl readers. There is an urgent need for research that explicitly centers on the reading motivations of Black girls through a humanizing, asset-oriented lens. Through a Situative Black Girlhood Reading Motivations lens, which integrates a situative perspective on motivation and the tenets of Black Girlhood Studies, this multi-year study focuses on a group of Black girl readers participating in a summer reading program. Qualitative data, including video observations, student work artifacts, and small-group artifact-elicited interviews, were analyzed through a generic inductive approach to answer …

One Font Doesn’T Fit All: The Influence Of Digital Text Personalization On Comprehension In Child And Adolescent Readers, Shannon M. Sheppard, Susanne L. Nobles, Anton Palma, Sophie Kajfez, Marjorie Jordan, Kathy Crowley, Sofie Beier

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

Reading comprehension is an essential skill. It is unclear whether and to what degree typography and font personalization may impact reading comprehension in younger readers. With advancements in technology, it is now feasible to personalize digital reading formats in general technology tools, but this feature is not yet available for many educational tools. The current study aimed to investigate the effect of character width and inter-letter spacing on reading speed and comprehension. We enrolled 94 children (kindergarten–8th grade) and compared performance with six font variations on a word-level semantic decision task (Experiment 1) and a passage-level comprehension task (Experiment 2). …

Morphology In Reading Comprehension Among School-Aged Readers Of English: A Synthesis And Meta-Analytic Structural Equation Modeling Study, Dongbo Zhang, Sihui (Echo) Ke, Ya Mo

Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article synthesizes the roles of morphology in English reading acquisition and reports a meta-analytic structural equation modeling study (k = 107, N = 21,818) that tested the effects of morphological awareness (MA) on reading comprehension in school-aged readers. Moderator analysis was conducted through a set of subgroup comparisons based on readers’ language status (monolingual vs. bilingual), age/grade (lower elementary, upper elementary, vs. middle/high school), and MA task modality (spoken vs. written). MA had significant indirect effects on reading comprehension via both word reading and vocabulary knowledge in the full sample as well as all subgroups. Its direct effect …

Differentiating Reading Profiles Of Children With Specific Comprehension Deficits From Skilled Readers: A Systematic Review, Daibao Guo, Luxi Feng, Tracey S. Hodges

Literacy, Language, and Culture Faculty Publications and Presentations

The primary goal of the present systematic review was to examine the criteria and measures used for assessing students with specific comprehension deficit (SCD), who have adequate decoding skills, but still perform poorly on reading comprehension assessments. From a systematic review of 32 studies, we found four predominant selection approaches for classifying students with SCD and a wide range of measurements of reading skills used to distinguish students with SCD from skilled readers. In addition, to develop a reading profile for students with SCD, we performed a meta-analysis to quantify the characteristics of SCD by comparing their reading skills to …

Comprehension, Diagram Analysis, Integration, And Interest: A Cross-Sectional Analysis, Courtney Hattan, Eunseo Lee, Alexandra List

Faculty Publications - College of Education

The current study examines a multidimensional set of outcome variables to understand whether different pre-reading scaffolds influence students’ text comprehension, diagram analysis, text integration, and interest; and investigates these constructs cross-sectionally to identify any progression as students move across grades. One-hundred fifty-six 3rd through 6th grade students enrolled in a public laboratory school were randomly assigned to one of three pre-reading conditions intended to activate or build students’ topic knowledge. Students completed a series of before, during, and after reading activities while engaging with grade appropriate texts about the topics of ecosystems and living things. Results indicate that there were …

Effect Of Professional Learning Communities About Vocabulary Instruction On Student Achievement In Reading Comprehension In Rural Iowa, Danielle Hart

Master's Theses & Capstone Projects

The research question for this study is based on how a PLC of singletons can best affect student scores on reading comprehension by focusing on vocabulary instruction. For the purpose of this research, students who were considered High Risk of not ending the year on grade level were progress monitored biweekly to determine the effect size of two different forms of PLCs on vocabulary instruction. In the first round of PLCs, the teachers implemented the Frayer Model for vocabulary instruction into the first class of the day. The data was compared from before the intervention until the end of the …

Lessons Learned: Effective Reading Practices For The Struggling Reader, Maria M. Salaiz, Marie Simonsson, Velma D. Menchaca

Organization and School Leadership Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study investigated schools who received Reading First (RF) monies to determine if student reading achievement in kindergarten through second grade was a function of the funding earmarked for implementation of the RF practices. The researchers also examined a seven-year reading progress trend to observe changes in Texas Primary Reading Inventory (TPRI) composite means of 37 participating campuses by grade level and by assessment measure from 2006 to 2012. Multiple linear regression and one-way repeated measures outputs were used for evaluating the evidence. A longitudinal progress trend was used over a seven-year period. Both a linear regression and a repeated …

Perceptions Regarding Reading Comprehension And Self-Efficacy In Students With Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Embedded-Multiple Case Study, Kevin Charles Hogge

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this embedded multiple case study was to explore perceptions of reading comprehension interventions in students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at public schools within the Commonwealth of Virginia and to discover common themes and strategies that help students with ASD. The sample pool consisted of approximately 62 students. The sample size included nine participants chosen through a purposeful sampling method relying on a maximum variation procedure. The research question focused on the lived experiences of students with ASD and their perceptions regarding reading comprehension and self-efficacy. The theory guiding this study was Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy; that …

Computer-Aided Response-To-Intervention For Reading Comprehension Based On Recommender System, Ming-Chi Liu, Wei-Yang Lin, Chia-Ling Tsai

Publications and Research

In 2019, New York State Education Department announced 54.6% of all students in grades 3 to 8 not meeting the standard of reading proficiency. Motivated by the need for a more efficient intervention model, we propose a recommender system to leverage the technology in machine learning to recommend suitable reading materials for effective intervention. The recommendation is based on the student's prior reading comprehension assessments and also assessments of other students at the same grade level using collaborative filtering. No other prior academic or demographic information of students is available. Two main challenges are lack of explicit ratings of reading …

Implementation Of Second Chance Reading, Peyton Paddock

Master's Theses & Capstone Projects

Students will struggle with reading, and it is harder on them when they have a reading disability. Providing support to these students can be critical in developing their reading comprehension and fluency skills. Second Chance Reading (SCR) is a great method of helping students receive the supports needed. Students with disabilities receive supports and accommodations. However, this does not mean that what they are receiving is what they need to be successful. A student reading faster but struggling to understand is just as bothersome as a student reading slower and struggling to understand. SCR helps students break down their reading …

The Role Of Word Knowledge In Error Detection: A Challenge To The Broken-Error-Monitor Account Of Dyslexia, Lindsay N. Harris, Benjamin Creed, Charles A. Perfetti, Benjamin Rickles

Faculty Peer-Reviewed Publications

Dyslexic children often fail to correct errors while reading aloud, and dyslexic adolescents and adults exhibit lower amplitudes of the error-related negativity (ERN)—the neural response to errors—than typical readers during silent reading. Past researchers therefore suggested that dyslexia may arise from a faulty error-detection mechanism that interferes with orthographic learning and text comprehension. An alternative possibility is that comprehension difficulty in dyslexics is primarily a downstream effect of low-quality lexical representations—that is, poor word knowledge. On this view the attenuated ERN in dyslexics is a byproduct, rather than a source, of underdeveloped orthographic knowledge. Because the second view implies a …

The Predictive Role Of Grapho-Morphological Knowledge In Reading Comprehension For Beginning-Level L2 Chinese Learners, Tianxu Chen, Sihui Ke, Keiko Koda

Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Publications

Reading comprehension entails a set of distinct, yet interdependent cognitive, linguistic, and nonlinguistic processes. Previous second language (L2) Chinese studies have identified significant and positive impacts of grapho-morphological knowledge at the character and subcharacter (radical) levels on passage reading comprehension; however, little is known regarding how early L2 grapho-morphological knowledge at the character and radical levels jointly predict later L2 reading comprehension. This study aimed to fill this gap. One hundred and five beginning-level L2 Chinese collegiate learners were recruited, and completed two character-related and two radical-related tasks in Week 8, as well as one reading comprehension tasks in Week …

Using Physical Activity To Improve Reading Comprehension, Jensen Flanigan

Master's Theses & Capstone Projects

Student reading proficiency lags grade-level expectations in the majority of the United States. Much research has demonstrated the moderating impact of student motivation on reading scores. The purpose of this action research was to study the effects of physical activity on reading motivation and reading comprehension, with a special focus on readers at risk for reading deficiencies as identified by FAST testing. The research was carried out on eighteen third grade students in rural Iowa, seven of whom were at risk for reading deficiency. The use of physical activity had a positive effect on both reading motivation and reading comprehension, …

The Role Of Background Knowledge In Reading Comprehension: A Critical Review, Reid Smith, Pamela Snow, Tanya Serry, Lorraine Hammond

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

© 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. A critical review was conducted to determine the influence background knowledge has on the reading comprehension of primary school-aged children. We identified twenty-three studies that met our criteria and focused on the links between background knowledge and reading comprehension of children in the mid to late primary years. Review findings highlight that higher levels of background knowledge have a range of effects that are influenced by the nature of the text, the quality of the situation model required, and the presence of reader misconceptions about the text. Our findings also indicate that background …

Progress In International Reading Literacy Study: Measuring And Making International Comparisons Of Student Achievement In Reading, Australian Council For Educational Research

Assessment GEMS

Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) is an ongoing, cyclical international study of student achievement in reading. It is directed by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). PIRLS measures the reading comprehension performance of students and collects a wide array of contextual information about students, schools, curricula and educational policies and systems. PIRLS is designed to inform educational practice and policy by providing an international perspective of teaching and learning in reading literacy.

Mocca College: An Assessment Of Inferential Narrative And Expository Comprehension, Mark L. Davison, Ben Seipel, Virginia Clinton-Lisell, Sarah E. Carlson, Patrick C. Kennedy

Education, Health & Behavior Studies Faculty Publications

MOCCA-C is an assessment of adult reading ability designed for early diagnosis of reading problems, for formative assessment in reading intervention planning, for assessment of reading improvement over time, and for assessment of reading intervention outcomes. It uses both narrative and expository reading passages and it currently has four forms. Two goals of this research were to compare narrative and expository passages on (a) their difficulty and (b) their ability to discriminate between good and poor readers. An additional goal was to assess whether narrative and expository passages measure the same or different comprehension dimensions. A final goal was to …

Do You Get The Picture?: A Meta-Analysis Of The Effect Of Graphics On Reading Comprehension, Daibao Guo, Shuai Zhang, Katherine Landau Wright, Erin M. Mctigue

Literacy, Language, and Culture Faculty Publications and Presentations

Although convergent research demonstrates that well-designed graphics can facilitate readers’ understanding of text, there are select situations where graphics have been shown to have no effect on learners’ overall text comprehension. Therefore, the current meta-analytic study examined 39 experimental studies published between 1985 and 2018 measuring graphics’ effects on readers’ comprehension. We first quantified the overall effect on reading comprehension. Then, we considered interactions with learners’ characteristics, graphic types, and assessment formats. Our analysis revealed that the inclusion of graphics had a moderate overall positive effect (Hedges’s g = 0.39) on students’ reading comprehension, regardless of grade level. Regarding graphic …

Using Think-Alouds To Support And Enhance English Language Learners' Comprehension Of Multimodal Texts, Daibao Guo, Eun Hye Son, Katherine Landau Wright

Literacy, Language, and Culture Faculty Publications and Presentations

Research has demonstrated that elementary students may not be skilled interpreters of multimodal science texts (McTigue & Flowers, 2010). This challenge may be enhanced for English language learners (ELLs), whose language skills are still developing. Therefore, in this qualitative case study, we implement think-aloud protocols to understand three striving ELL readers’ comprehension processes and use of comprehension strategies. Then we collaborated with three pre-service teachers to design individualized comprehension instructions. After 7-weeks of intensive tutoring, findings show students were able to use a greater variety comprehension strategies. Classroom implications are discussed to provide best instructional practice for striving ELL readers.

A Case Study On Improving Reading Fluency At A University In The Uae, Jenny Eppard, Sandra Baroudi, Aicha Rochdi

All Works

© 2020 Eskisehir Osmangazi University. Students native to the Arabian Gulf region often struggle with reading skills. The purpose of this study was to explore the reading habits and reading culture of Emirati undergraduate students and to investigate the use of a particular reading strategy (Listening While Reading) on undergraduate Emirati students reading rate and comprehension. This case study was conducted through a mixed method research design. It was carried out with sixty-one SLL (second language learners) undergraduate students. By assigning them into two groups, the experimental group (28 students) was given books with an auditory component, while the control …

Vocabulary Instruction: Impacts Of Using A Science Notebook In A Dual Language Setting To Teach Science Vocabulary And Content., Manuel Andazola

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Language learners and students in general often struggle to close the achievement gap in monolingual schools because they lose academic content due to lack of vocabulary. To combat this issue, programs such as dual language schools have been introduced and have gained popularity due to their ability to help students keep learning academic content in their native language while becoming literate in the second language and also maintaining literacy in the content areas. Although these programs offer different instruction models and teaching techniques that teachers are implementing to improve science literacy, many teachers still struggle to find creative and effective …

Setting The Foundation For Democratization: Assessing The Quality Of A Political Science Program In Egypt, Yasmin Khodary

Political Science

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the quality of a political science program in an Egyptian private university through assessing three particular dimensions: knowledge of political science core facts and theories; reading comprehension skills; and critical thinking (CT).

Design/methodology/approach – A case study research approach was used. The study relies also on a quantitative methodology. Quantitative data were collected from students in the second and fourth years of political science to assess their knowledge of core political science facts and theories, reading comprehension and CT through the online California Critical Thinking Skills Test.

Findings – Unlike …

Developing A Comprehension Instruction Observation Rubric, Evelyn S. Johnson, Laura A. Moylan, Angela Crawford, Yuzhu Zheng

Early and Special Education Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this study, we developed a Reading for Meaning special education teacher observation rubric that details the elements of evidence-based comprehension instruction and tested its psychometric properties using many-faceted Rasch measurement (MFRM). Video observations of classroom instruction from 10 special education teachers across three states during the 2015- 16 school year were collected. External raters (n=4) were trained to observe and evaluate instruction using the rubric, and assign scores of ‘implemented’, ‘partially implemented’ or ‘not implemented’ for each of the items. Analyses showed that the item, teacher, lesson and rater facets achieved high psychometric quality for the instrument. Teacher performance …

Lexical-Level Predictors Of Reading Comprehension In Third Grade: Is Spelling A Unique Contributor?, Kimberly A. Murphy, Laura M. Justice

Communication Disorders & Special Education Faculty Publications

Purpose:

Considerable research effort has focused on understanding reading comprehension and reading comprehension difficulties. The purpose of this correlational study was to add to the small but growing body of literature on the role that spelling may play in reading comprehension, by investigating the full range of lexical-level literacy skills and whether spelling makes a unique contribution. This study also explored whether these relations vary with the spelling scoring metric.

Method:

Data were collected from 63 children attending Grade 3 in a Midwestern state. In addition to measuring reading comprehension, word recognition, and vocabulary, 4 spelling scoring metrics were examined: …

The Effect Of Reciprocal Mapping On Third-Grade Students’ Reading Comprehension Achievement And Reading Attitude, Olga Elena Flamion

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Reading comprehension is the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language (Snow, Science and Technology, and States, 2002). For many students, there is a decrease in reading achievement as early as fourth grade as a result of increased demands in complexity of intermediate text (Williams et al., 2005). Reading attitude is “a system of feelings related to reading which causes the learner to approach or avoid a reading situation” (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975, p. 1). McKenna, Kear, and Ellsworth (1995) found that attitude towards reading grew increasingly negative as students moved from first …

Students Who Like To Read – What Does The Research Say?, Sue Thomson

Teacher columnist - Sue Thomson

What do Year 4 students think about reading? Is it fun? Do they think they learn anything? Sue Thomson explores these questions in her first Teacher column.

An Analysis On English Comprehension, Samuel Black, Jerry Rylance, Matthew Sielaff, Aaron Gorman

Math 365 Class Projects

Books and Buddies is a program run by Spread the Word Nevada (StWN) designed to help students who struggle with reading. As part of the program, students are given pre and post tests which measure comprehension, accuracy, and words correct per minute (WCPM).

A data set was provided that included students' scores on the pre and post test, as well as some general demographic information. A Python program was created to perform linear regressions on subsets of the data, measured on the three attributes listed above. The data was also divided into various categories for the sake of the regressions. …

Revising The Metacognitive Awareness Of Reading Strategies Inventory (Marsi) And Testing For Factorial Invariance, Kouider Mokhtari, Dimiter M. Dimitrov, Carla A. Reichard

Education Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this study, we revised the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI), a self-report instrument designed to assess students’ awareness of reading strategies when reading school-related materials. We collected evidence of structural, generalizability, and external aspects of validity for the revised inventory (MARSI-R). We first conducted a confirmatory factor analysis of the MARSI instrument, which resulted in the reduction of the number of strategy statements from 30 to 15. We then tested MARSI-R for factorial invariance across gender and ethnic groups and found that there is a uniformity in student interpretation of the reading strategy statements across these groups, …