Learners often insufficiently monitor their comprehension, which results in overconfident judgments of learning and underachievement. In the 3 present experiments, we investigated whether insufficient comprehension monitoring is due in part to the fact that learners are not sufficiently aware of the benefit of comprehension monitoring and thus…

Shared-book reading is a well-established intervention to foster vocabulary development. Factors influencing its effectiveness are, however, less well studied, particularly with regard to story-delivery. We contrasted a read-aloud with a free storytelling approach and tested effects on vocabulary learning. In the first study, 83 preschoolers aged…

In this intervention study, we investigated how we could teach university students who were majoring in education to teach reading strategies. The goal of the study was to analyze whether and to what extent students would benefit from the intervention with respect to their own learning. Did their own reading skills improve after they attended the…

Multimedia integration signals highlight correspondences between text and pictures with the aim of supporting learning from multimedia. A recent meta-analysis revealed that only learners with low domain-specific prior knowledge benefit from multimedia integration signals. To more thoroughly investigate the influence of prior knowledge on the…

The study "Improving Language And Reading Skills (LARS) in children with German as a first or second language" evaluates a newly developed differentiating programme for reading in terms of its effects on the reading and language ability of second graders with German as a first or second language. The participant group consisted of 105…

Reading strategy interventions relying upon peer tutoring are a common way to foster poor readers' comprehension skills. Those interventions are based on the assumption that tutees benefit from the (higher) reading skills of their tutors. However, this interpersonal effect has not yet been tested explicitly because the effectiveness of peer…

Lexicon Pirate was originally developed as a strategy intervention programme to treat lexical disorders of pre-school children. To evaluate the therapy's effectiveness for school-age students, a randomized controlled trial (RCT, N = 157) was conducted. Based on a pre--post-test design, the programme's impacts were compared with a control group…

Monitoring the learning progress of at-risk students positively affects learning growth. This study transfers the approach of learning progress assessment (LPA) to general education in Germany and investigates the effects of information about reading progress and additional teacher training on student achievement. Classes (n = 43) were assigned to…

A randomized control intervention study was conducted to evaluate the effects of the highly structured Heidelberg Parent-Based Language Intervention (HPLI). The outcomes of 43 children (n = 23 intervention, n = 20 control) who had been identified as late talkers during routine developmental check-ups carried out in pediatric practices at the age…

There are many established reading strategy training programmes, which explicitly teach strategic and meta-cognitive knowledge to improve reading comprehension. Although instruction in strategy knowledge leads to improvements in meta-cognitive skills, the effects do not always transfer to reading comprehension. Therefore, to investigate…

The purpose of this study was to examine the technical adequacy of a computer-based assessment instrument which is based on hierarchical models of text comprehension for monitoring student reading progress following the Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) approach. At intervals of two weeks, 120 third-grade students finished eight CBM tests. To…