The purpose of this study was to examine clusters of less-skilled college readers. College students with below average reading comprehension skills (N = 77) read and thought aloud about four texts, recalled the texts, and completed standardized assessments of reading skills. Based on the findings of cluster analyses of the cognitive processes…

Reading comprehension is essential for students' ability to build knowledge. Students' comprehension abilities can be enhanced by providing students with deliberate practice and formative feedback on reading comprehension strategies. iSTART is an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) that is designed to provide instruction in reading strategies with…

Reading is typically guided by a task or goal (e.g., studying for a test, writing a paper). A reader's task awareness arises from their mental representation of the task and plays an important role in guiding reading processes, ultimately influencing comprehension outcomes and task success. As such, a better understanding of how task awareness…

Analyzing constructed responses, such as think-alouds or self-explanations, can reveal valuable information about readers' comprehension strategies. The current study expands on the extant work by (1) investigating combinations and patterns of comprehension strategies that readers use and (2) examining the extent to which these patterns relate to…

As access to higher education increases, it is important to monitor students with special needs to facilitate the provision of appropriate resources and support. Although metrics such as ACT's (formerly American College Testing) "reading readiness" provide insight into how many students may need such resources, they do not specify…

Standardized reading assessments are often used as an admissions criterion for college admittance, however, the relationship and predictive validity of reading assessments to academic achievement remains in question. Through a quantitative review of the literature, we conducted a meta-analysis to examine how well performance on college reading…

Theories of discourse argue that comprehension depends on the coherence of the learner's mental representation. Our aim is to create a reliable automated representation to estimate readers' level of comprehension based on different productions, namely self-explanations and answers to open-ended questions. Previous work relied on Cohesion Network…

The inference mediation hypothesis (IMH) assumes that individual difference factors that affect reading proficiency have direct and indirect effects on comprehension outcomes, with the indirect effects involving inference processes. The present study tested the IMH in a diverse sample of two and four-year college students in a task that emphasizes…

We used survey and administrative data from Washington State to assess the degree to which special education teacher preparation, district literacy instructional practices, and the alignment between preparation and practice were associated with the reading test score gains of students with high-incidence disabilities taught by early-career special…

Coherent mental models for successful comprehension require inferences that establish semantic "bridges" between discourse constituents and "elaborations" that incorporate relevant background knowledge. While it is established that individual differences in the extent to which postsecondary students engage in these processes…

We conducted a meta-analysis to investigate reading-writing relations. Beyond the overall relation, we systematically investigated moderation of the relation as a function of linguistic grain size (word reading and spelling versus reading comprehension and written composition), measurement of reading comprehension (e.g., multiple choice,…

The writing skills of autistic university students have received very little empirical attention. Previous research has suggested that autistic people may struggle with writing, in part, due to challenges with Theory of Mind. However, other research indicates that Theory of Mind difficulties are far from universal in autism, varying across…

The main goal of the present research was to test whether the presence of analogies would affect the relative accuracy of metacognitive judgments about learning from expository science texts, and whether any effect would depend on the type of cues that readers used as the basis for their judgments of comprehension. In a series of experiments,…

Originally designed for students in Grades 3 through 5, MOCCA (formerly the Multiple-choice Online Causal Comprehension Assessment), identifies students who struggle with comprehension, and helps uncover why they struggle. There are many reasons why students might not comprehend what they read. They may struggle with decoding, or reading words…

The goal of this study was to assess the relationships between computational approaches to analyzing constructed responses made during reading and individual differences in the foundational skills of reading in college readers. We also explored if these relationships were consistent across texts and samples collected at different institutions and…