Search

Internet-based reading involves integration and evaluation of information from different sources and different formats, but also requires fluent navigation skills for adequate comprehension. The effects of linguistic (word decoding and comprehension-based print reading) and non-cognitive factors (reading frequency and self-efficacy) have extensively been studied for print reading; we know very little about their role in Internet reading, which is our focus in this study. 558 students from grades 7 to 10 performed a set of comprehension-based Internet reading tasks on a computer, while their navigation and comprehension scores were recorded. They were also assessed on print reading literacy, word decoding, Internet reading frequency and self-efficacy. Multiple regression analyses suggest that navigation skills increase proportionally with grade level and that print reading literacy and comprehension-based Internet reading share common processes. Moreover, the positive effect of navigation efficiency on Internet comprehension increases in higher grade levels. Finally, reading frequency of the Internet for informational purposes predicts Internet comprehension scores, and self-efficacy predicts more persistent and quicker navigation.

We conducted two experiments to analyze how text availability and question format affect readers’ processes and performance on measures of expository text reading comprehension. Junior high school students read expository texts and answered both multiple choice and open-ended questions on a computer that recorded reading times and readers’ actions with Read&Answer software. The results showed that readers reread prior text segments during initial reading of the text more often when they knew that the text would be unavailable when answering questions than when they knew that the text would be available. In addition, readers made more search decisions in the text- available condition when answering open-ended questions than when answering multiple-choice questions. Regarding performance, we repeatedly found an interaction effect between availability and question format: text availability benefited the open-ended but not the multiple-choice format. We concluded that the two availability conditions are useful in assessing different discourse processes. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for the development of models of reading and new ways to assess reading literacy skills that emphasize purposeful reading.

International audience; The present study investigates the effectiveness of question paraphrases in supporting students' understanding of a specific task. Secondary school students (i.e., eighth grade) read two texts and answered several questions while texts were available. A paraphrase including core information about each question was included before students provided their answer. Individual differences in reading comprehension explained the beneficial effect of paraphrases. Concretely, the presentation of paraphrases improved the performance of less-skilled but not skilled comprehenders. These findings are discussed in terms of the processes involved in task model formation and individual differences underlying these processes.

The goal of this study was to determine the effect of setting a delay between reading a text and answering comprehension questions on when-to-search and what-to-search decisions in a task-oriented reading environment. Fifty-five eighth-grade students were randomly divided into two groups. One group read one text, answered comprehension questions regarding the text with the text available, and subsequently repeated the procedure with a second text (immediate condition). The other group read both texts first and then answered, with the texts available, the questions for the first text and then for the second text (delayed condition). In both conditions, the readers’ actions during the task were recorded. The results demonstrated that the students in the delayed condition made more search decisions. In addition, moderated mediation analyses indicated that setting a delay had a positive indirect effect on performance via increased searching only for the students with average and high comprehension skills. Moreover, decisions regarding what information to search for depended exclusively on comprehension skill. Instructional implications are discussed.

The study includes two experiments to analyse the effects of automatic formative feedback designed to promote the transfer of self-regulation of strategic decisions in task-oriented reading e.g. answering questions from an available text. Secondary-school students read and answered multiple-choice comprehension questions from two texts having them available while receiving consistent feedback about their performance and strategic decisions. Then, they read a different text and answered questions also with the text available, but receiving no feedback. In Experiment 1, we tested two feedback procedures that differed in task conditions and the feedback information associated to these conditions. The most effective was a procedure that forced students to select relevant text information to answer each question and provided accurate feedback based on that selection. Experiment 2 was designed to disentangle the role played by the selection task from that played by the feedback provided. We found that the two components contribute to transfer the self-regulation strategies, although each one has a specific role for different strategies. Theoretical and practical implications of the studies are discussed.

This study analyses the efficacy of formative feedback to boost students’ search behaviour when answering comprehension questions in a with-text reading situation, which is a common reading situation in instructional and assessment settings. In these reading situations search strategies play an important role to predict students’ performance. Sixty-five high school students read two texts and answered eight multiple-choice comprehension questions per text using the software Read&Answer, which recorded all the students’ actions. After answering each question, students received either global-search-feedback or specific-search-feedback, which differed in the specificity of their information, or no-feedback. Participants who received any feedback had a second chance to correct their wrong answers. Specific-search-feedback increased students’ search decisions and improved their use of relevant information to repair wrong answers over global-search-feedback. Consequently, specific-search-feedback improv...

This study investigates the possibility of assessing strategic reading literacy skills with computers. The critical value of this assessment is the recording of online indices of the reader's behavior that can be interpreted in terms of strategies. The study uses materials of a standardized paper-and-pencil reading literacy test called CompLEC (Llorens et?al., 2011) and a technology called Read&Answer (Vidal-Abarca et?al., 2011) that presents texts and questions with a masking procedure that allows the recording of reading time and readers' actions to develop a computer-based version called e-CompLEC. We found that reliability and validity of the two versions are largely equivalent, and that e-CompLEC provides self-regulation and reading behavior indices predictive of performance. The study also shows how self-regulation is an important component of reading literacy processes. We test the possibility of assessing reading literacy skills automatically.The assessment includes performance and online indices of the reader's behavior.Our computer-based and paper-and-pencil assessments tools are largely equivalent.Online self-regulation and reading behavior indices predict performance scores.

This study analyses the effectiveness of adaptive formative feedback to boost strategic search decisions and performance when students are asked to answer a set of questions in a task-oriented reading situation. We compared automatic feedback that included information about the right answer with feedback that also included the connection between the students' strategic search decisions and their performance. Ninety-two high school students read two non-continuous texts. They received feedback during a training phase, and then they read and also received feedback with a similar text in a final phase. Text and questions were presented using a new computer-based technology that provided automatic adaptive feedback depending on the experimental condition: right-answer feedback, strategic-search-decisions feedback and placebo feedback. We found that strategic-search-decisions feedback improved strategic decisions over right-answer and placebo feedback in the final text, which in turn improved question-answering performance. Some positive effects were also found during training. These results open new possibilities to adaptive automatic procedures to teach task-oriented reading skills to students.

People often read to fulfill the requirement of a task that demands comprehension, which can be called task-oriented reading. Task- oriented reading activities are associated with reading literacy competencies promoted by international reading literacy assessment programs and definitions of reading skills that emphasize the role of the reader, the tasks, and the social context in reading. Task- oriented reading situations place specific self-regulatory demands on readers that go beyond the scope of comprehension processes considered by current theories and models of comprehension. Read&Answer is an application developed to record actions and reading time on task-oriented situations in an electronic environment. In this paper we describe Read&Answer and summarize studies on the impact that tasks of different nature have on how readers interact with a text and their final performance, as well as some strategies specific to task-oriented reading situations.

The purpose of the study was to explore students’ selection of information strategies in a task-oriented reading situation. 72 secondary school students read two texts and answered six questions per text, three of which were manipulated to induce a misleading matching between the wording of the question and distracting pieces of information in the text. The reading and question-answering were presented with the software Read&Answer. We analyzed how skilled and less-skilled comprehenders were attracted to the distracting pieces of information and how this affected reading patterns and task outcomes. Skilled comprehenders scored higher and were able to discard the distracting information. In contrast, less-skilled comprehenders copied and processed this information in more detail. On-line data provided evidence for these behaviors. These results suggest that skilled comprehension facilitates the use of idea-based selection of information strategies, whereas less-skilled comprehension induces the inappropriate use of word-matching selection of information strategies.

We present an application to study task-oriented reading processes called Read&Answer. The application mimics paper-and-pencil situations in which a reader interacts with one or more documents to perform a specific task, such as answering questions, writing an essay, or similar activities. Read&Answer presents documents and questions with a mask. The reader unmasks documents and questions so that only a piece of information is available at a time. This way the entire interaction between the reader and the documents on the task is recorded and can be analyzed. We describe Read&Answer and present its applications for research and assessment. Finally, we explain two studies that compare readers' performance on Read&Answer with students' reading times and comprehension levels on a paper-and-pencil task, and on a computer task recorded with eye-tracking. The use of Read&Answer produced similar comprehension scores, although it changed the pattern of reading times.

The goal of this study is to analyze the self-regulation processes present in task-oriented reading activities. In the 1st experiment, we examined the following self-regulation processes in the context of answering questions about an available text: (a) monitoring the comprehension of the question, (b) self-regulating the search process, and (c) monitoring the decision to search. Skilled and less skilled comprehenders from 7th and 8th grades read 2 texts and answered 16 questions while all their actions were recorded on a computer. We hypothesized that skilled comprehenders would differ from less skilled comprehenders on the 1st 2 processes on the basis of their general comprehension skills but that their superiority in the 3rd process would be based on specific characteristics of the interaction between the reader and the text. The results support our hypotheses. In the 2nd experiment, we hypothesized that monitoring the decision to search would be equivalent to judgments of learning (JOLs). Eighth graders made JOLs before answering every question, and then they decided whether to search the text. Our hypothesis was confirmed. Our study reveals that task-oriented reading places specific demands on readers related to metacognitive monitoring

This article reports on two experiments where undergraduates read five documents on a scientific topic and afterwards answered comprehension questions and wrote either summaries or argument essays on the topic. In the first experiment, students who were instructed to work with the documents for the purpose of summarizing their contents displayed better comprehension and integration of document contents than did students instructed to construct arguments from the documents. In the second experiment, focusing on whether the effects of task instructions on multiple-documents comprehension and integration could be moderated by students’ prior knowledge, it was found that only students with high prior knowledge were able to take advantage of instructions to construct arguments while reading, whereas low-knowledge readers seemed to be more hindered than helped by such task instructions. Theoretical as well as educational implications of these findings are discussed.

This study examined the effect of (a) high- and low-level questions and (b) reading the text before the questions asked on performance, delayed text recall, and deep text comprehension, as well as on specific text-inspection patterns. Participants were 37 undergraduate students who answered either high- or low-level questions using the software Read&Answer to read and answer questions on the computer screen. Additionally, half of the sample read first a text and then answered the questions (reading-first condition), whereas the other half answered the questions without having read the text in advance (no-reading-first condition). All participants had the text available to search for the answer. Results indicated that high-level questions facilitated deep comprehension but not immediate performance or delayed recall of text, independently of the reading condition, and that high- and low-level questions differentially affected text-inspection patterns.

This paper is aimed at presenting Read&Answer, a tool that records reading times, one of the main on-line methods employed in text processing research. Read&Answer allows the recording, analysis and interpretation of the learner processing in order to test specific hypotheses and explain final comprehension results. First, we will describe the tool, and then we will briefly explain some research studies using the tool. We will show how Read&Answer can be used in combination with another on-line method extensively employed in text processing research, i.e., verbal protocols, and we will also compare Read&Answer with eye movement tracking, a widely accepted on-line reading times technique.

Previous evidence with English beginning readers suggests that some orthographic effects, such as the orthographic neighborhood density effects, could be stronger for children than for adults. Particularly, children respond more accurately to words with many orthographic neighbors than to words with few neighbors. The magnitude of the effects for children is much higher than for adults, and some researchers have proposed that these effects could be progressively modulated according to reading expertise. The present paper explores in depth how children from 1stto 6thgrade perform a lexical decision with words that are from dense or sparse orthographic neighborhoods, attending not only to accuracy measures, but also to response latencies, through a computer-controlled task. Our results reveal that children (like adults) show clear neighborhood density effects, and that these effects do not seem to depend on reading expertise. Contrarily to previous claims, the present work shows that orthographic neighborhood effects are not progressively modulated by reading skill. Further, these data strongly support the idea of a general language-independent preference for using the lexical route instead of grapheme-to-phoneme conversions, even in beginning readers. The implications of these results for developmental models in reading and for models in visual word recognition and orthographic encoding are discussed.

The authors examine 2 issues: (a) how students integrate information from multiple scientific documents to describe and explain a physical phenomenon that represents a subset of the information in the documents; and (b) the role of 2 sorts of tasks to achieve this type of integration, either writing an essay on a question requiring integration across texts or answering shorter intratext questions that require students to integrate information within a single text, while superficial and deep comprehension measurements are obtained. Undergraduate students answered 1 of the 2 types of questions, and their reading times were recorded. Half of the sample thought aloud. Results showed that the integration question increased integration and decreased the processing of isolated units of information, which enhanced deep learning, whereas no differences between the 2 sorts of tasks on memory recall were apparent. This research also provides evidence for the discrepancy between training and posttraining effects (R. A. Schmidt & R. A. Bjork, 1992).

Answering questions from texts are assessment and instructional activities that are frequently used in schools. Nevertheless, little is known about the strategic processes that students take while performing these tasks. We explored the amount and frequency that students initially read of a text before they answered questions pertaining to the material. In a procedure similar to the one used in the PISA (Program for International Students Assessment), one-hundred-seventy students between 7thand 9thgrade read and answered several questions designed to assess task-oriented reading in three specific texts. We recorded on-line indexes that evaluated student behavior (e.g., the amount of text that students read before answering questions raised within a given text), performance, and comprehension skill. The results revealed that students skilled in comprehension initially read a high proportion of the texts, which in turn improved their overall performance in two of the three texts read (text 1: CI95%: 0.01 to 0.09; text 2: CI95%: –0.01 to 0.05; text 3: CI95%: 0.04 to 0.20). Therefore, we conclude that this strategic behavior should be considered during the assessment and instruction of reading literacy.

This paper presents two experiments testing whether an approach to revise a text that fosters the reader's active processing benefits both high and low-knowledge readers. A history text and two alternative revised versions, one fostering the reader's inferential activity and the other reducing it, were employed. Junior high school students with low and high background knowledge about information related to the text topic participated in experiment 1, whereas undergraduate students with low and high knowledge on both the text topic and related information participated in experiment 2. One-third of the students for each condition in both experiments read either the original passage or one of the two revised versions. The revised version, aimed at fostering the reader's inferential activity, benefited low and high-knowledge readers on memory recall and inferences in both experiments, whereas the version aimed at reducing inferential activity had positive effects on recall but not on inferences. Active processing during reading seems to be the crucial factor to explain learning from texts. Consequences for the development of instructional texts are discussed.

Adaptive feedback has showed to be effective to enhance strategic reading behaviors and performance in task-oriented reading situations, but it is difficult to be implemented in classroom environments. Computer-based systems allow overcoming these challenges. We conducted an experiment in which secondary-school students read two texts, answered comprehension questions and selected relevant text information while receiving automatic feedback about selection accuracy and performance. Two experimental conditions were designed to assess the effects of feedback and selection attempts. Then, students perform a transfer task without any of these elements. We found that one-attempt and two-attempt groups outperformed the control group on the training phase and improved their searching process in the transfer phase, although two-attempt group showed a more effective searching process. In addition, both experimental groups were more aware about the effective strategies. This study emphasizes the potential of computer-based systems to teach specific task-oriented readings skill.

The goal of this study was to compare 2 approaches for improving instructional text. The first was based on the procedure created by B. K. Britton and S. Gulgoz (1991) as derived from W. Kintsch and T. A. van Dijk's theory (1978). It emphasized the reduction of the reader's inferential activity. We created a second method that was inspired by theories of narrative comprehension (P. van den Broek, 1990; A. C. Graesser, M. Singer, & T. Trabasso, 1994). We oriented it toward triggering causal inferences in the reader. Alternative versions of an original passage on history were elaborated for each of the 2 methods. Sixty-four 8th graders read either the original passage or one of the revised versions and were tested on memory (i.e., recall) and learning (i.e., inference questions). Only the 2nd procedure produced benefits on inferential learning, though both procedures had a limited effect on recall.

In this paper we describe a new version of a former paper-and-pencil standardized comprehension test called Test of Comprehension Processes (Vidal-Abarca, Gilabert, Martínez, & Sellés, 2007). The new version has been adapted to a computer-based environment based on the moving window technique. It can be used to assess comprehension strategies of students from fifth to tenth grades (11 to 16 years old). Comprehension strategies are registered on-line using reading times and visits to relevant sections of the text during the question-answering process. Data show that the computerbased version draws similar results to those provided by the paper-and-pencil version. In addition, we identify the particular strategies deployed during the question-answering process by high, medium and low comprehenders. Tomas.Martinez@uv.es; Eduardo.Vidal-Abarca@uv.es; Laura.Gil@uv.es; Ramiro.Gilabert@uv.es