This study examined whether particular practices in story retelling improve children's comprehension of story structure and enables them to further comment on the story content. Eighty-three (83) kindergarten children (M = 5.4) years old composed the experimental (N = 43) and the control (N = 40) groups. For 6 weeks, one time per week, six…

The differences and similarities in the word recognition and reading comprehension skills of monoliterate Albanian-Greek (ML2), biliterate Albanian-Greek (BL2) and monolingual (L1) children in grades 3-6 were examined in two cross-sectional studies. Participants completed standardized and experimental tasks measuring cognitive, oral language and…

In this article, the change in examinee effort during an assessment, which we will refer to as persistence, is modeled as an effect of item position. A multilevel extension is proposed to analyze hierarchically structured data and decompose the individual differences in persistence. Data from the 2009 Program of International Student Achievement…

The concept of Matthew effects in reading development refers to a longitudinally widening gap between high achievers and low achievers. Various statistical approaches have been proposed to examine this idea. However, little attention has been paid to psychometric issues of scaling. Specifically, interval-level data are required to compare…

We examined the longitudinal predictors of nonword decoding, reading fluency, and spelling in three languages that vary in orthographic depth: Finnish, Greek, and English. Eighty-two English-speaking, 70 Greek, and 88 Finnish children were followed from the age of 5.5 years old until Grade 2. Prior to any reading instruction, they were…

We examine the performance of dyslexic participants on an unsupervised categorization task against that of matched non-dyslexic control participants. Unsupervised categorization is a cognitive process critical for conceptual development. Existing research in dyslexia has emphasized perceptual tasks and supervised categorization tasks (for which…

This study was designed to examine whether there is a relationship between phonological memory and reading ability in Greek-speaking children aged between 6 and 9 years. An additional aim of the study was to investigate whether training of phonological memory during preschool years enhances reading achievement during early school years. In…