The effects of updating ability and knowledge of reading strategies on reading comprehension
Section snippets
1. Introduction
Text comprehension is a complex cognitive activity (Rapp & van den Broek, 2005). Abundant evidence shows that the comprehension of a text is dependent on word decoding and general language skills, such as vocabulary knowledge (e.g.Hoover, W. A. and Gough, P. B., 1990, Verhoeven, L. and Perfetti, C., 2008). Beyond these foundational skills, more general cognitive and metacognitive processes are involved. In the current study we focused on the relationships of updating ability and knowledge of
2.1. Participants
Participants were 195 Dutch fourth graders from seven regular elementary schools in the Netherlands of which 82% was native speaker. The sample comprised 102 boys and 93 girls with a mean age of 9;10 years (SD = 5.89 months).
2.2. Measures
Measures were selected to investigate updating ability, reading strategies, and reading comprehension. Measures for reading speed, vocabulary knowledge, and verbal short term memory were used as control variables.
3.1. Data preparation
Seven children, who had missings on more than half of the tests, were removed. In the remaining sample of 188 children two outlier scores (more than three standard deviations below or above the mean), on the word span task and the LOVS, were considered as missing. In all 5% of the scores was missing. Little's MCAR test revealed that data were missing at random (predictors: χ2 (26) = 29.71, p = .28; reading comprehension tests: χ2 (2) = 1.52, p = .47). In order to be able to use all participants in the
4. Discussion
We examined the relations of updating ability and reading strategies with reading comprehension in an unselected sample of typically developing children. We found that updating did not contribute to reading comprehension, when reading speed, vocabulary, and verbal short term memory were controlled. However, we did find a specific relationship of knowledge of reading strategies with reading comprehension. The relations of the predictors with reading comprehension were similar for both measures
Acknowledgments
This research was funded by the NWO Programming Council for Educational Research (PROO) (411-10-925).
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