ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Reading on the Internet requires specific skills (e.g., navigation), apart from comprehension abilities, but there is no test in Spanish to assess these skills in adolescents. The goal of this study is to fill this gap with a test called WebLEC, inspired by the PISA framework. METHOD: WebLEC was validated with secondary education students (n = 941). It includes 28 items of three types (access & retrieve, integrate & interpret, and reflect & evaluate) applied to four reading scenarios (e.g., web portal, search engines, Internet forums, and Wikipedia). WebLEC provides a general reading literacy index, plus two navigation indices. RESULTS: The validity and reliability of WebLEC was confirmed, and a scale to diagnose reading literacy skills is provided. CONCLUSIONS: WebLEC assesses adolescents' Internet reading literacy skills. Given the growing importance of the Internet in daily life and learning situations, assessing these skills is the first step in implementing instructional interventions to foster Internet reading
ANTECEDENTES: leer en Internet requiere habilidades específicas (e.g., navegación) aparte de habilidades de comprensión. No existe en español un test para evaluar estas habilidades en población adolescente. El propósito de este trabajo es cubrir esta laguna con el test WebLEC, desarrollado a partir del marco de PISA. MÉTODO: WebLEC fue validado con estudiantes de Educación Secundaria Obligatoria (ESO) (n = 941). Incluye 28 ítems o tareas de tres tipos (acceso y recuperación, integrar e interpretar, y reflexionar y evaluar) aplicadas a 4 escenarios de lectura (portal web, buscador, foro de internet y Wikipedia). WebLEC proporciona un índice general de competencia lectora y dos índices de navegación. RESULTADOS: se confirma la validez y fiabilidad de WebLEC, y se proporciona un baremo para los diferentes cursos de ESO. CONCLUSIONES: WebLEC sirve para evaluar la competencia lectora en Internet de estudiantes de ESO. Dada la creciente importancia de Internet para la vida ordinaria y el aprendizaje, evaluar estas habilidades es el primer paso para implementar intervenciones para la mejora de la competencia lectora en Internet
Subject(s)
Humans , Male , Female , Adolescent , Educational Measurement , Internet , Literacy , ReadingABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Reading on the Internet requires specific skills (e.g., navigation), apart from comprehension abilities, but there is no test in Spanish to assess these skills in adolescents. The goal of this study is to fill this gap with a test called WebLEC, inspired by the PISA framework. METHOD: WebLEC was validated with secondary education students (n = 941). It includes 28 items of three types (access & retrieve, integrate & interpret, and reflect & evaluate) applied to four reading scenarios (e.g., web portal, search engines, Internet forums, and Wikipedia). WebLEC provides a general reading literacy index, plus two navigation indices. RESULTS: The validity and reliability of WebLEC was confirmed, and a scale to diagnose reading literacy skills is provided. CONCLUSIONS: WebLEC assesses adolescents’ Internet reading literacy skills. Given the growing importance of the Internet in daily life and learning situations, assessing these skills is the first step in implementing instructional interventions to foster Internet reading.
Subject(s)
Educational Measurement , Internet , Literacy , Reading , Adolescent , Female , Humans , MaleABSTRACT
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 7th and 9th grade 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.
Subject(s)
Adolescent Behavior/psychology , Comprehension/physiology , Educational Measurement , Reading , Students/psychology , Adolescent , Female , Humans , Male , SchoolsABSTRACT
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 7th and 9th grade 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 (AU)
No disponible
Subject(s)
Humans , Male , Female , Adolescent , Comprehension/physiology , Reading , Underachievement , Students/psychology , Education, Primary and Secondary , Comprehension/classification , Educational Status , Task Performance and Analysis , Students/classificationABSTRACT
This study had two main purposes. First, to measure high-school students' task model representation under the instruction to self-explain questions; second, to test the effects of self-generated explanations on task-demands understanding and performance on questions. We designed a simple experimental situation where high-school students were asked to read two texts and answer questions. Only in half of the questions students were required to self-explain with their own words what the question was asking them for before answering. Contrary to our expectations, self-explaining the questions did not significantly affect skilled comprehenders, whereas it hindered performance in less-skilled comprehenders. Moreover, it inhibited their active engagement in search for textual units of information. Less-skilled comprehenders' explanation protocols included inaccuracies, with consequences on the search process and success in the task. The relationship among quality of task model, search for information and success is discussed in light of the TRACE model (Rouet, 2006).
Subject(s)
Comprehension/physiology , Learning/physiology , Reading , Students/psychology , Test Taking Skills/psychology , Adolescent , Female , Humans , MaleABSTRACT
This study had two main purposes. First, to measure high-school students task model representation under the instruction to self-explain questions; second, to test the effects of self-generated explanations on task-demands understanding and performance on questions. We designed a simple experimental situation where high-school students were asked to read two texts and answer questions. Only in half of the questions students were required to self-explain with their own words what the question was asking them for before answering. Contrary to our expectations, self-explaining the questions did not significantly affect skilled comprehenders, whereas it hindered performance in less-skilled comprehenders. Moreover, it inhibited their active engagement in search for textual units of information. Less-skilled comprehenders explanation protocols included inaccuracies, with consequences on the search process and success in the task. The relationship among quality of task model, search for information and success is discussed in light of the TRACE model (Rouet, 2006) (AU)
No disponible
Subject(s)
Humans , Male , Female , Child , Adolescent , Student Health Services/methods , Students/psychology , Models, Psychological , Comprehension/physiology , Surveys and Questionnaires , Probability Learning , Mental Competency/psychologyABSTRACT
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.
Subject(s)
Psychomotor Performance/physiology , Reading , Algorithms , Comprehension , Eye Movements/physiology , Female , Humans , Male , Online Systems , Reproducibility of Results , Research Design , Young AdultABSTRACT
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 computer-based 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.
Subject(s)
Computer-Assisted Instruction/methods , Language Tests , Learning , Online Systems/instrumentation , Reading , Adolescent , Analysis of Variance , Child , Comprehension/physiology , Eye Movements/physiology , Humans , Semantics , Students/psychology , Surveys and QuestionnairesABSTRACT
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 (AU)
En el presente artículo presentamos una nueva versión de un test de comprensión estandarizado de lápiz y papel llamado Test de Procesos de Comprensión (Vidal-Abarca, Gilabert, Martínez, & Sellés, 2007), el cual ha sido adaptado a un entorno electrónico mediante la utilización una técnica de ventana móvil. Esta versión electrónica puede ser usada para diagnosticar estrategias de comprensión de escolares entre 5º de Primaria y 4º de Educación Secundaria Obligatoria (11 a 16 años). Las estrategias de comprensión se miden registrando tiempos de lectura y visitas a segmentos relevantes del texto de forma on-line durante el proceso de responder a preguntas del texto. Los resultados muestran en primer lugar que la versión electrónica es similar a la versión papel y lápiz. En segundo lugar, se muestran diferentes estrategias durante el proceso de respuesta a preguntas del texto que son características de estudiantes con estrategias de comprensión de nivel alto, medio y bajo (AU)
Subject(s)
Humans , Child , Adolescent , Reading , Language Tests , Computer-Assisted Instruction/methods , Online Systems/instrumentation , Semantics , Students/psychology , Surveys and Questionnaires , Data Collection , Comprehension , Analysis of Variance , Eye Movements/physiologyABSTRACT
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 1st to 6th grade 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.
Subject(s)
Discrimination Learning , Pattern Recognition, Visual , Reading , Semantics , Verbal Learning , Child , Female , Humans , Judgment , Male , Psycholinguistics , Psychomotor Performance , Reaction Time , VocabularyABSTRACT
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 neighbours than to words with few neighbors. The magnitude of the effects for children is much higher than for adults, and some researcher shave proposed that these effects could be progressively modulated according to reading expertise. The present paper explores in depth how children from 1st to 6th grade 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 (AU)
La investigación previa con lectores principiantes de ingles sugiere que algunos efectos ortográficos, tales como los efectos de la densidad (vecindad ortográfica), podrían ser más fuertes para los niños que para los adultos. En especial, los niños responden con mayor precisión a las palabras con muchos vecinos ortográficos que a las palabras con pocos vecinos. La magnitud de los efectos para los niños es mucho más alta que para los adultos, y algunos investigadores han propuesto que estos efectos podrían modularse progresivamente en función de la competencia lectora. Este estudio explora en profundidad cómo los niños de 1º a 6º curso llevan a cabo una decisión léxica con las palabras procedentes de vecindades ortográficas densas o escasas, atendiendo no sólo a las medidas de precisión sino también a las latencias de respuesta, mediante una tarea controlada por ordenador. Nuestros resultados revelan que los niños (como los adultos) muestran claros efectos de densidad (vecindad ortográfica), y que dichos efectos no parecen depender de la competencia lectora. Al contrario de observaciones previas, el trabajo actual muestra que los efectos de vecindad ortográfica no se modulan progresivamente según la competencia lectora. Además, estos datos claramente apoyan la idea de la preferencia por la ruta léxica, que no depende del lenguaje, en vez de las conversiones grafema-a-fonema, incluso en lectores principiantes. Se comentan las implicaciones de estos resultados para los modelos evolutivos de la lectura y para los modelos de reconocimiento visual de las palabras y la codificación ortográfica (AU)
Subject(s)
Humans , Male , Female , Child , Language , Learning , Speech Acoustics , Language DevelopmentABSTRACT
Qualitative methods that analyze the coherence of expository texts not only are time consuming, but also present challenges in collecting data on coding reliability. We describe software that analyzes expository texts more rapidly and produces a notable level of objectivity. ETAT (Expository Text Analysis Tool) analyzes the coherence of expository texts. ETAT adopts a symbolic representational system, known as conceptual graph structures. ETAT follows three steps: segmentation of a text into nodes, classification of the unidentified nodes, and linking the nodes with relational arcs. ETAT automatically constructs a graph in the form of nodes and their interrelationships, along with various attendant statistics and information about noninterrelated, isolated nodes. ETAT was developed in Java, so it is compatible with virtually all computer systems.
