Abstract
Text comprehension is a sophisticated process that is influenced by the reader’s cognitive skills, prior knowledge and the type of texts. The aim of the present longitudinal study was to assess the students’ ability to analyse and evaluate the narrative text in Grades 4 and 5. A total of 831 Estonian students were tested in two consecutive years. The results indicated that fewer than half of the students succeeded in analysing and evaluating the contents of the text, while the students’ text comprehension skills in Grade 5 were significantly better than in Grade 4. Students had more difficulties answering the questions that examined their skill of evaluating the text, compared to their ability to analyse the text. This led to the conclusion that teachers should pay more attention to the students’ higher-level cognitive processes and support their text comprehension skills. Keywords: Analysis and evaluation skills; Basic school; Reading; Text comprehension
Highlights
Text comprehension can be defined as a reader’s ability to find the main idea of the text and to learn from the context (Snow, 2002)
We examined students’ higher-level text comprehension in Grades 4 and 5
We found that our sample included less than 50% students with higher-level text comprehension skills
Summary
Text comprehension can be defined as a reader’s ability to find the main idea of the text and to learn from the context (Snow, 2002) To this end the readers have to construct a whole by making several inferences and integrating different phrases, sentences and arguments appearing in the text (Eason, Goldberg, Young, Geist, & Cutting, 2012; Kaplan, 2013). Students’ higher-level text comprehension skills have been studied to significantly lesser degree (Basabara, Yovanoff, Alonzo, & Tindal, 2013). These skills require the students to possess the ability to make inferences and relate different types of sentences as well as make conclusions and evaluate the text
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