This study aims to determine the effectiveness of Fry readability-based digital storybooks on reading comprehension skills among elementary school students. The method used in this study was an experimental research design with a pretest-posttest control group design to measure students' reading comprehension skills. The sample of this study was…

Estimating the difficulty of reading tests is critical in second language education and assessment. This study was aimed at examining various text features that might influence the difficulty level of a high-stakes reading comprehension test and predict test takers' scores. To this end, the responses provided by 17,900 test takers on the reading…

This study examined the extent to which prior beliefs and reading instructions impacted elements of a reader's mental representation of multiple texts. College students' beliefs about childhood vaccinations were assessed before reading two anti-vaccine and two pro-vaccine texts. Participants in the experimental condition read for the purpose of…

Though the empirical findings of the past studies in the literature have offered strong support to the significant role of language knowledge and background knowledge in reading comprehension, this issue has not been explored with regard to specific purposes tests in the Iranian higher education context. Therefore, this study aimed at exploring…

Reading comprehension instruction may be critical for students to learn from social studies text, particularly for students who are not yet proficient in reading. Understanding factors that correspond to high levels of student engagement during text-based social studies instruction appears particularly important. Data were collected from 50…

A teacher's ability to read effectively is critical to that individual's ability to teach reading skills. Correspondingly, most state departments of education require that prospective teachers earn a passing score on a standardized reading comprehension test before they can enter university-based teacher education programs or otherwise get a…

We compared high school students' performance in a traditional comprehension assessment requiring them to identify key information and draw inferences from single texts, and a scenario-based assessment (SBA) requiring them to integrate, evaluate and apply information across multiple sources. Both assessments focused on a non-academic topic.…

According to the RAND model framework, reading comprehension test performance is influenced by readers' reading skills or reader characteristics, test properties, and their interactions. However, little empirical research has systematically compared the impacts of reader characteristics, test properties, and reader-test interactions across…

This research compared the contributions of lexical inferencing, decoding, and listening comprehension to reading comprehension in Chinese-speaking learners of English as a second language (ESL) enrolled in university bridging programs in the U.S. and Chinese-speaking university learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in mainland China.…

The present study investigates whether textual enhancement had any effects on grammar learning (tag questions) and reading comprehension, and whether the types of tag question contributed to the benefits of textual enhancement. The study employed a pretest--posttest design with three treatment sessions. The target forms were English tag questions,…

This study explored the effects of processing texts in print or digitally on readers' comprehension, processing time, and calibration. Eighty-six undergraduates read print and digital versions of book excerpts about childhood ailments presented in counterbalanced order. Comprehension was tested at three levels (i.e., main idea, key points, and…

Some individuals with developmental dyslexia are able to acquire age-appropriate reading comprehension abilities by the time they reach postsecondary education. This study explored the role that study strategies have with secondary students with dyslexia in achieving age-appropriate reading comprehension skills. The findings of this study…

A recent Educational Testing Services report (2016) found that international graduate students with a TOEFL score of 80--the minimum average TOEFL score for graduate admission in the United States--usually possess reading subscores of 20, equating to a 12th-grade reading comprehension level. However, one public flagship university's international…

This study demonstrates the generalization of previous laboratory results showing the benefits of Self-Explanation Reading Training (SERT) to college students' course exam performance. The participants were 265 students enrolled in an Introductory Biology course, 59 of whom were provided with SERT. The results showed that SERT benefited students…

The present study examined the technical adequacy of maze-selection tasks constructed in 2 different ways: typical versus novel. We selected distractors for each measure systematically based on rules related to the content of the passage and the part of speech of the correct choice. Participants included 262 middle school students who were…