Previous research based on large-scale studies consistently suggests that on average, male students tend to have lower literacy compared to their female students during secondary schooling. However, this gender gap in literacy seems to "disappear" during adulthood. Up until today, only a few studies investigated the role of assessment…

Comparison is an important geographic method and a common task in geography education. Mastering comparison is a complex competency and written comparisons are challenging tasks both for students and assessors. As yet, however, there is no set test for evaluating comparison competency nor tool for enhancing it. Moreover, little is known about…

Hypertext comprehension often suffers from inadequate representation of the text's structure. Explication of the local paragraph macrostructure within each node might help to overcome this obstacle. As headings show several deficits, especially in digital text, marginalia are considered a promising alternative in signaling hypertext structure as…

Two studies investigated the effects of errors in German business letters written by Dutch students. Gaining insight into these effects is important since Germany and the Netherlands are one of the largest economically interdependent partnerships. One hundred and fifty-six German professionals rated letters with errors and letters without errors…

Assessing student writing is a complex task and experimental studies have shown that textual determinants, such as spelling or vocabulary, affect teachers' judgments of other analytic criteria in student essays. Among these elements, organisation has not been extensively explored. This experimental study examines how organisational quality…

The Reading Acceleration Program (RAP), which uses adaptively increasing text erasure rates to enforce reading rate improvements, has been positively evaluated in various languages, reader and age groups. The current study compared the established incremental increase of text erasure rate with a training using fixed erasure rates in two groups of…

This study investigated the effects of auditory and audiovisual text presentation on the three levels of mental representations assumed in theories of discourse processing. A sample of 106 children aged 7, 9, and 11 years listened to 16 short narrative texts, 8 of which were accompanied by a series of pictures illustrating the content.…

During reading, the model of the situation described by the text is continuously accommodated to new text input. The hypothesis was tested that readers are particularly sensitive to diagnostic text information that can be used to constrain their existing situation model. In 3 experiments, adult participants read narratives about social situations…