Automated summary evaluation is proposed as an alternative to rubrics and multiple-choice tests in knowledge assessment. Inbuilt rubric is a recent Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) method that implements rubrics in an artificially-generated semantic space. It was compared with classical LSA's cosine-based methods assessing knowledge in a…

Poorer adolescent readers are often regarded by teachers as unable to read whole narratives and given short, simplified texts, yet are expected to analyse every part in a slow laborious read-through. This article reports on a mixed methods study in which 20 English teachers in the South of England changed their current practice to read two whole…

The effects of social annotation on critical literacy remain controversial, and little research has explained why some students can benefit from social annotation in critical literacy, and some cannot. This chapter investigates the effects of social annotation on critical literacy and the interactive patterns of social annotations. The…

The study is situated at the interface between reading comprehension and critical thinking research. Its purpose was to examine the influence of reading goals and argument quality on the comprehension and critical evaluation of argumentative texts. Young adult readers read to comprehend or evaluate texts on two different controversial issues.…

This dissertation investigated how various features of scenario-based assessments (SBAs) affect reading comprehension and measures of engagement (e.g., situational interest and motivation) with a sample of college students. SBAs are assessments that contain several features not traditionally found in reading assessments. These features include an…

In the past few decades, literature has consistently suggested that bilingual children are at risk for academic failure due to their limited language skills. However, many of these studies included underprivileged bilingual children, and few of them attempted to disentangle the effects of bilingualism from the effects of socio-economic status.…

This study investigated the effect of explicit reading strategy instruction on reading comprehension, reading strategy use, reading motivation, and reading self-efficacy in Chinese university EFL learners. A total of 117 first-year university students were randomly assigned to either the experimental group or the control group. Students in the…

The aim of this study was to examine the effect of instruction of self-regulatory strategies on the L2 reading comprehension of Iranian EFL learners on the one hand and improve the students' self-regulated learning on the other hand. In this research, the experimental group (N=35) received instruction on self-regulatory strategies whereas the…

Decades of research in the science of reading suggest that using scientifically based reading practices that are aligned with the science of reading will help improve literacy. Literacy is a necessary skill and is critical for a child's overall development. How well children learn to read in school can impact their future success. This mixed…

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…

Despite historical emphasis on "specific" learning disabilities (SLDs), academic skills are strongly correlated across the curriculum. Thus, one can ask how specific SLDs truly are. To answer this question, we used bifactor models to identify variance shared across academic domains (academic "g"), as well as variance unique to…

Research with school-age readers suggests that the contributions of reading and language skills vary across reading comprehension assessments and proficiency levels. With a sample of 168 struggling adult readers, we estimated the explanatory effects of decoding, oral vocabulary, listening comprehension, fluency, background knowledge, and…

This study used wrap-up effects on eye movements to assess the relationship between online reading behavior and comprehension. Participants, assessed on measures of reading, vocabulary, and spelling, read short passages that manipulated whether a syntactic boundary was "unmarked" by punctuation, "weakly marked" by a comma, or…

In two studies, we explored the associations among situational reading-related competence beliefs and task value, inference strategies, comprehension during reading, and foundational skills in college age students. In Study 1, 93 participants from a community college completed assessments of comprehension and two types of inference strategies…