Investigating students' perceived cognitive needs in university academic reading: a latent variable approach

Abstract

Although there have been extensive theoretical discussions on the various reading skills needed in academic situations, empirical investigations on this topic are scarce. There is even much less research on the latent structure underlying those skill needs. This study attempts to fill this gap by investigating the perceived factorial structure of academic reading skills and the relative importance of each factor based on questionnaire responses by 221 undergraduates from an English‐medium university in New Zealand. A series of factor analyses and hierarchical model testing revealed that the respondents' perceived needs in academic reading consisted of five distinguishable subdomains, which could be further divided into non‐expeditious reading and expeditious reading. It was also found that the subdomain of textbase comprehension (e.g., understanding explicit details and main ideas) was needed significantly more than other subdomains, although all subdomains were reported to be needed more than half of the time. These findings not only support previous major theoretical discussions about reading types from a novel perspective (i.e., students' perceived needs) but also help specify the skill areas that academic reading curricula and assessments may need to cover and prioritise.