One way to determine whether consumers understand a document is to use a readability formula to assign it a score.' These formulas calculate readability by counting such variables as the number of words and syllables in a passage or document. The idea of readability formulas has been defined as "an equation which combines those text features that best predict text difficulty. The equation is us...

The advent of smart devices and consumerisation of IT has produced a significant and permanent shift away from print-based reading to digital reading. This, in turn, has changed people’s reading behaviours and suggests that adapted mechanisms should be considered to support digital reading. It is particularly important for novice readers who need to read in-depth scientific literature in their ...

This qualitative research study explores how teacher prompting and questioning impacts students’ comprehension of texts. The researcher observed a third grade teacher, Mrs. G., at a local elementary school in order to discern patterns in how this teacher used verbal prompts and questions to assist her students in understanding what they read. An initial interview was conducted with Mrs. G. to d...

Dyslexia and attentional problems are often comorbid. This raises the question whether reading deficits might etiologically follow from attentional difficulties, a hypothesis that has been proposed in regard to visuo-spatial attention deficits. This visuo-spatial attention deficit hypothesis would predict that attention deficits should be specific to dyslexia. However, it is here estimated that...

Children differ in their ability to learn what is taught at school. Evidence from twin studies suggests that genetic effects contribute to such differences. The aim of the present study was to systematically review the existing literature, including 61 studies from 11 cohorts, on twin studies of educational achievement in primary school children. The meta-analysis estimated heritability, based ...

When students in Taiwan enter into higher education, the reading demands placed upon them often lead them to select ineffective and inefficient strategies with little strategic intent. To investigate how reading strategy use affects the development of Taiwanese EFL learners’ reading comprehension, the aim of this study was to investigate the relationship and differences of four reading strategy...

In this paper, we present an automatic classification approach to identify reading disorders in children. This identification is based on a standardized test. In the original setup the test is performed by a human supervisor who measures the reading duration and notes down all reading errors of the child at the same time. In this manner we recorded tests of 38 children who were suspected to hav...

Comprehension is the essence of reading. Finding appropriate and effective reading strategies to support students’ reading comprehension has always been a critical issue for educators. This article presents findings from a meta-analysis of 17 studies of metacognitive strategy instruction on students’ reading comprehension in computerized reading contexts. Overall, some instances of metacognitiv...

This paper introduces the ARCADE (Automated Reading Comprehension Assessment and Diagnostic Evaluation) system which is an automated psychometric diagnostic reading comprehension assessment tool based upon contempory theories of reading comprehension. ARCADE attempts to identify the presence of particular components of a reader’s understanding of a text from open-ended free response data. An em...

Reading is an essential factor for success at school that requires certain skills and strategies of great complexity rarely taught in schools. Verbalization of comprehension strategies can be considered an effective measure in learning to read. The purpose of this study was to analyze the effect of a program of teaching reading strategies implemented through interactive dialogic reading groups ...