Differences In Reading Performance Research Articles

Economic status differences in reading performance: A multiyear study of grade 4 Black boys in Texas

In this statewide, multiyear analysis conducted in the United States, the extent to which Grade 4 Black boys differed in their reading performance on the Texas state-mandated reading assessment as function of their economic status (i.e., economically disadvantaged and not economically disadvantaged) was determined. Analysis of three school years of Texas statewide data yielded statistically significant differences in reading by the economic status of Black boys. In all three school years and in all three reporting categories, Black boys who were in poverty answered statistically significantly fewer items correctly than Black boys who were not in poverty. Similarly, statistically significantly lower percentages of Black boys who were in poverty met the three grade level standards than Black boys who were not in poverty. Implications for policy and for practice, along with recommendations for future research, were provided.

Reading Development from Kindergarten to Age 18: The Role of Gender and Parental Education

AbstractThe gender difference in reading achievement in favor of adolescent girls is a robust finding in the literature, but the evidence is mixed when considering younger children. The present study followed the development of reading skills among Finnish children (N = 1867) from kindergarten age (6 years) to 18 years of age to determine the onset of gender differences and to identify the subskills which present gender differences. Additionally, associations between parents' educational levels and children's reading development from kindergarten to the end of comprehensive school were examined to determine whether the effect of parental education varied by child's gender. The results showed that girls outperformed boys in almost all prereading and reading skills from kindergarten age onwards. The gender difference in reading fluency increased steadily across the school years (Cohen's d = .26–.59) and remained evident also among 18‐year‐olds (d = .42). In terms of reading comprehension, the gender difference was small but increased with age (d = .17–.36). Parents' education levels were associated with children's reading development and children of higher educated parents manifested the best performance. Interaction effects were found between child's gender and their fathers' education levels: lower education levels were associated with poorer PISA reading performance among boys, but not among girls. The results suggest that gender differences in reading performance have an early onset, they increase throughout the school years, and boys of fathers with low education are particularly at risk of falling behind in their development of reading comprehension skill.

Factors Affecting the Reading Performance of the Junior High School Learners

The study was conducted at Sil-ipon Integrated School (SIS) and aimed to assess the factors that affected the reading performance level of junior high students. The researcher evaluated the demographic profile of the learners, their reading proficiency levels, differences in reading performance based on their profiles, and a proposed reading intervention plan. Demographic profiles were assessed using frequency and percentage, which revealed that the majority of the respondents were 8th grade students, mostly female, and ranged in age from 14 to 16 years old. They frequently had 1 to 3 siblings, and their parents were both high-school level with a monthly family income of below 5,000 pesos. Reading proficiency levels were evaluated through Phil-IRI 2018 assessment tool which measures the reading speed, word reading, and reading comprehension scores. The findings showed that junior high school students of SIS had a low/frustration proficiency level, indicating that they experienced difficulties in reading. To determine differences in reading proficiency scores based on learners group profile, T-tests and ANOVA were used. The results showed that grade level, age, and number of siblings significantly influenced the learners reading proficiency level. Finally, a comprehensive reading intervention plan was proposed that involved providing targeted interventions, increasing access to non-print reading materials, and collaborating with families and the community. The study was conducted to help educators and school administrators improve the reading skills of the learners.

High-achieving ninth grade students’ self-reported strategy use and its relation to strategic reading behavior

Strategies in reading are viewed as essential tools needed to increase comprehension and learning from text. Especially in large-scale assessments, reliable and economic measures of reading strategies are needed which are valid to assess the strategy-performance relation. Questionnaire-based self-report measures are very popular but often fail to establish a positive relation between strategy use and performance. Nevertheless, these measures are objective and content valid as well as efficient in use. One explanation for this fact may be that, depending on students’ individual approaches to reading, various strategies may lead to better performance. Then, self-report questionnaires of strategy use (SRQs) would assess differences in strategic approaches of students which are not (necessarily) linked to performance. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether students’ differences in self-reported strategy use correspond to different strategic approaches in reading. The present study compares strategic reading behavior of a homogeneous sample of 22 high-achieving ninth grade students with superior performance in reading who were chosen for their high reading-related strategy knowledge and their difference in self-reported strategy use, assessed via questionnaire. Eleven students reported frequent strategy use (FSU) and 11 students reported seldom strategy use (SSU). For both groups, strategic reading behavior was assessed in an unobtrusive way using a computer-based multiple-choice reading test. Even though both groups showed little to none differences in reading performance, results indicate that FSU and SSU students differ in processing of text during initial reading and while re-reading text passages. In addition, they differed in how they proceed with reading tasks.

Supporting Young Readers: A Mixed-Methods Study of Their Literacy, Behaviour, and Perceptions When Reading Aloud to Dogs or Adults.

Animal-assisted interventions (AAI) have been found to benefit human emotional state and cognitive performance. Recent applications of AAI have extended to classrooms with a range of intentions including to improve literacy. This Canadian study sought to examine differences in reading performance and behaviour in early readers identified as requiring extra supports following exposure to a canine-assisted and adult-assisted reading support. Twenty-four 7- to 8-year-olds experienced both supports in random order. At the start of the study and after completion of either support learners’ oral reading, reading comprehension, social functioning, and reading affect were assessed. Parents, teachers, and children were also asked a range of closed- and open-ended questions. Findings showed evidence of improvement in reading performance, particularly after reading to a dog. There was also evidence of improved social competence overall and decreased problematic behaviour, although this was dependent on order of exposure. Teacher and parent reports showed they believed both supports to improve learner skills and affect for reading, and that teachers made more distinctions here. Implications for the practical application and relevance of methodological detail for future work are discussed.

An Eye-Tracking Study on Reading Comprehension and Reading Processing in Children with Reading Difficulties according to Story Type and Processing Load

Objectives: This study aimed to investigate differences in reading performance between two groups of children, children with reading difficulties (RD) and typically developing children (TD), depending on story types and length of given text. To comprehensively evaluate children’s reading ability, both offline and online processing were taken into consideration, and chunking skill was measured to explore the relationship between working memory and reading comprehension. Methods: Twenty-six children (11 with RD and 15 with TD) in 3rd to 4th grade of elementary school participated in this study. Two experimental tasks were conducted: a reading comprehension task using an eye-tracker and a word list recall task. While reading the text, children’s eye movements were analyzed to identify online reading processing. After they finished reading, they were asked to answer the offline reading comprehension questions. Results: There were significant differences in reading comprehension depending on the group, the story type, and the level of processing load. For the fixation, there was an interaction effect between the group and the story type. Also, as a result of heat map analysis, the fixation of the RD group was evenly distributed throughout the texts given at low processing load. In addition, as a result of correlation analysis, there was a significant difference in patterns of using chunking skills in reading comprehension between the two groups. Conclusion: This study has a clinical implication in that it suggested that presenting reading materials concisely could be one of the ways to improve reading comprehension in the RD group.

The involvement of inhibition in word and sentence reading.

Individual differences in reading performance between children appear from the onset of literacy acquisition. One possible explanation for this variability is the influence of inhibition in reading ability, a topic that has received very little research attention. Nevertheless, children often make guessing errors characterized by replacing a word with an orthographic neighbor, possibly linked to failing inhibition. The present study aims to evaluate the role of inhibition during word and sentence reading and compare its effects in spoken and motor tasks. Participants comprised 25 children in Grades 2 and 3 (Mage = 8; 2). The children performed five inhibition tasks in reading (words, sentences), spoken (words, sentences) and motor modalities. Within the two reading tasks, inhibition demands were assessed using pairs of orthographic neighbors for which the frequency was manipulated. Accuracy, types of errors, latency, and response times were measured. GLMM analyses demonstrated that children were sensitive to the inhibitory demands of both spoken tasks and of the sentence reading task regarding accuracy, latency, and response times. Indeed, children made more mistakes and were slower when inhibitory demands were augmented. They also made more guessing errors in the word reading task. No such inhibitory effect was found in the motor task. Moreover, correlational analyses revealed that children who showed better inhibitory skills were able to read words and texts more accurately. These findings suggest that children need to utilize inhibitory resources when processing words or sentences and that these inhibitory skills are involved in overall reading ability.

Sex differences in the intrinsic reading neural networks of Chinese children

Sex differences in reading performance have been considered a relatively stable phenomenon. However, there is no general agreement about their neural basis, which might be due to that sex differences are largely influenced by age. This paper focuses on the sex differences in the reading-related neural network of Chinese children and its interaction with age. We also attempt to predict reading abilities based on neural network. Fifty-three boys and 56 girls (8.2–14.6 years of age) were recruited. We collected their resting-state fMRI and behavioural data. Restricted sex differences were found in the resting-state reading neural network compared to extensive age by sex interaction effect. Specifically, the interactions between sex and age indicated that with increasing age, girls showed greater connectivity strength between visual orthographic areas and other brain areas within the reading network, while boys showed an opposite trend. After controlling age, the prediction models of reading performance for the girls mainly included interhemispheric connections, while the intrahemispheric connections (particularly the phonological route) mainly contributed to predicting the reading ability for boys. Taken together, these findings suggest that sex differences in reading neural networks are modulated by age. Partialling out age, boys and girls also show the stable sex differences in relationship between reading neural circuit and reading behaviour.

The assessment of collaborative problem solving in PISA 2015: An investigation of the validity of the PISA 2015 CPS tasks

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is the world's most extensive assessment of student's scholastic and general abilities, featuring assessments in over 70 countries. In the program's 2015 cycle, the assessment included a computerized measure of collaborative problem-solving skills (CPS) using virtual agents. Studies on the validity of this approach are sparse, however. To firstly investigate whether this computer-supported approach was validly assessing CPS, we obtained the original tasks from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). We identified the extent to which the assessment is related to existing collaboration measures, including subjective self-rated collaboration, external teacher-rated collaboration, co-player collaboration, as well as reasoning and reading. The results of structural equation modeling and response surface analysis (N = 483) showed that self-rated collaboration, teacher-rated collaboration, co-player collaboration, and reasoning were moderately related to PISA 2015 CPS performance, even after controlling for individual differences in reading performance.

Girls’ comparative advantage in reading can largely explain the gender gap in math-related fields

Gender differences in math performance are now small in developed countries and they cannot explain on their own the strong underrepresentation of women in math-related fields. This latter result is however no longer true once gender differences in reading performance are also taken into account. Using individual-level data on 300,000 15-y-old students in 64 countries, we show that the difference between a student performance in reading and math is 80% of a standard deviation (SD) larger for girls than boys, a magnitude considered as very large. When this difference is controlled for, the gender gap in students' intentions to pursue math-intensive studies and careers is reduced by around 75%, while gender gaps in self-concept in math, declared interest for math or attitudes toward math entirely disappear. These latter variables are also much less able to explain the gender gap in intentions to study math than is students' difference in performance between math and reading. These results are in line with choice models in which educational decisions involve intraindividual comparisons of achievement and self-beliefs in different subjects as well as cultural norms regarding gender. To directly show that intraindividual comparisons of achievement impact students' intended careers, we use differences across schools in teaching resources dedicated to math and reading as exogenous variations of students' comparative advantage for math. Results confirm that the comparative advantage in math with respect to reading at the time of making educational choices plays a key role in the process leading to women's underrepresentation in math-intensive fields.

Word scanning in native and non-native languages: insights into reading with declined accommodation.

This study investigated the effects of declined accommodation on reading performance in non-native and native languages. Eighteen native Japanese speakers participated: eight presbyopes and ten non-presbyopes. In the experiment, participants were asked to scan, or sequentially read six-word items presented in two-line texts, identify a non-word target as quickly as possible, and indicate its location. In addition to the participant type (presbyopes/non-presbyopes) and language of the reading material (Japanese/English), viewing distance (35cm/70cm) and contrast (18%/100%) were manipulated. The results showed that the presbyopes exhibited worse reading performance than the non-presbyopes at closer distances irrespective of the language. Notably, the inferiority of the presbyopes' reading performance was more pronounced when they read in a non-native language than in their native language. It should be noted that differences in reading performance between the presbyopes and non-presbyopes were subtle for high-contrast words at longer viewing distances, indicating that age- or cohort-related perceptual, motor, and cognitive differences were almost negligible, but accommodation mattered. These results suggest that the effect of accommodation decline is influenced by the language of the reading material.

Reading Ability in Primary Open-angle Glaucoma: Evaluation with Radner Reading Charts.

This study determined the impact of visual disabilities caused by glaucoma on the patient's everyday life and emphasized the importance of developing strategies to improve reading ability in primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG) patients. The purposes of this study were to investigate the reading performances of patients affected by POAG using the Italian version of the Radner Reading Charts and to test the presence of correlation between visual field (VF) damage and reading parameters. In this cross-sectional observational study, all patients underwent a complete ophthalmic evaluation including VF testing and evaluation of reading performance using the Radner Reading Charts. The parameters for testing reading performance were reading acuity in logRAD, reading speed in words per minute, maximum reading speed, critical print size, and reading mistakes. Primary open-angle glaucoma and healthy groups were compared using the Mann-Whitney U test. The correlation between VF and reading parameters in glaucomatous eyes was assessed using Spearman correlation analysis. Based on VF mean deviation, each POAG patient had differences in reading performance between his/her best and worst eyes when compared using the paired Wilcoxon test. Statistical significance was set at P ≤ .05. Eighty POAG patients and 60 healthy controls were enrolled. Glaucomatous subjects read slowly (166.63 ± 29.40 vs. 193.84 ± 26.20 words per minute, P < .0001) and made more mistakes than did healthy subjects. The critical print size for POAG patients was larger than the one for controls (0.52 ± 0.18 vs. 0.62 ± 0.16, P < .0001). Reading parameters showed a moderate correlation with VF mean deviation. The reading parameters were significantly impaired in the worst eye, and this result confirms the impact of VF loss on reading ability. This study demonstrated that glaucomatous patients read slowly and with more errors. Reading performances showed a good correlation with VF defect.

Girls' Comparative Advantage in Reading Can Largely Account for the Gender Gap in Math-Intensive Fields

Gender differences in math performance are now small in developed countries and they cannot explain on their own the strong under-representation of women in math-related fields. This latter result is however no longer true once gender differences in reading performance are also taken into account. Using individual-level data on 300,000 15-year-old students in 64 countries, we show that the difference between a student performance in reading and math is 80% of a standard deviation larger for girls than boys, a magnitude considered as very large. When this difference is controlled for, the gender gap in students' intentions to pursue math-intensive studies and careers is reduced by around 75%, while gender gaps in self-concept in math, declared interest for math or attitudes towards math entirely disappear. These latter variables are also much less able to explain the gender gap in intentions to study math than is students' difference in performance between math and reading. These results are in line with choice models in which educational decisions involve intra-individual comparisons of achievement and self-beliefs in different subjects as well as cultural norms regarding gender. To directly show that intra-individual comparisons of achievement impact students' intended careers, we use differences across schools in teaching resources dedicated to math and reading as exogenous variations of students comparative advantage for math. Results confirm that the comparative advantage in math with respect to reading at the time of making educational choices plays a key role in the process leading to women's under-representation in math-intensive fields.

READING DIFFERENCES BETWEEN GREEK DYSLEXIC AND NON-DYSLEXIC UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IN GREECE

Until recently the vast majority of dyslexia research focused on English-speaking and children population, who tend to read significantly slower but mainly inaccurately, due to the inconsistency of the English language. This led to the wrong assumption that the main feature of dyslexia is inaccurate reading. However, results of research in phonologically consistent languages, such as Greek, Italian, German, Finnish, showed that reading speed is the main deficit of dyslexic readers in either children or adult population. The aim of this research was to investigate the differences in reading performance (reading speed, accuracy and comprehension) between Greek dyslexic university students and age-matched normal controls. A group of 26 Greek dyslexic university students was compared to a group of 28 non-dyslexics matched for age, sex and socio-educational level. All participants in the dyslexic group had a formal diagnosis of dyslexia. Results showed that dyslexics attained statistically significantly slower reading speed and made more reading errors compared to controls in all testing procedures (p&lt;.001). However, dyslexics read at almost the same speed in both the aloud and silent reading conditions (p&gt;.05) in contrast to non-dyslexics who read significantly faster in the silent condition (p&lt;.05). Greek dyslexic university students were accurately differentiated from non-dyslexics based on the reading speed only (accuracy level 98.1%).

Do eye movements reveal differences between monolingual and bilingual children’s first-language and second-language reading? A focus on word frequency effects

An extensive body of research has examined reading acquisition and performance in monolingual children. Surprisingly, however, much less is known about reading in bilingual children, who outnumber monolingual children globally. Here, we address this important imbalance in the literature by employing eye movement recordings to examine both global (i.e., text-level) and local (i.e., word-level) aspects of monolingual and bilingual children’s reading performance across their first-language (L1) and second-language (L2). We also had a specific focus on lexical accessibility, indexed by word frequency effects. We had three main findings. First, bilingual children displayed reduced global and local L1 reading performance relative to monolingual children, including larger L1 word frequency effects. Second, bilingual children displayed reduced global and local L2 versus L1 reading performance, including larger L2 word frequency effects. Third, both groups of children displayed reduced global and local reading performance relative to adult comparison groups (across their known languages), including larger word frequency effects. Notably, our first finding was not captured by traditional offline measures of reading, such as standardized tests, suggesting that these measures may lack the sensitivity to detect such nuanced between-group differences in reading performance. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that bilingual children’s simultaneous exposure to two reading systems leads to eye movement reading behavior that differs from that of monolingual children and has important consequences for how lexical information is accessed and integrated in both languages.

Prereader to beginning reader: changes induced by reading acquisition in print and speech brain networks.

Literacy acquisition is a demanding process that induces significant changes in the brain, especially in the spoken and written language networks. Nevertheless, large-scale paediatric fMRI studies are still limited. We analyzed fMRI data to show how individual differences in reading performance correlate with brain activation for speech and print in 111 children attending kindergarten or first grade and examined group differences between a matched subset of emergent-readers and prereaders. Across the entire cohort, individual differences analysis revealed that reading skill was positively correlated with the magnitude of activation difference between words and symbol strings in left superior temporal, inferior frontal and fusiform gyri. Group comparisons of the matched subset of pre- and emergent-readers showed higher activity for emergent-readers in left inferior frontal, precentral, and postcentral gyri. Individual differences in activation for natural versus vocoded speech were also positively correlated with reading skill, primarily in the left temporal cortex. However, in contrast to studies on adult illiterates, group comparisons revealed higher activity in prereaders compared to readers in the frontal lobes. Print-speech coactivation was observed only in readers and individual differences analyses revealed a positive correlation between convergence and reading skill in the left superior temporal sulcus. These results emphasise that a child's brain undergoes several modifications to both visual and oral language systems in the process of learning to read. They also suggest that print-speech convergence is a hallmark of acquiring literacy.

An examination of student- and across-level mediation mechanisms accounting for gender differences in reading performance: a multilevel analysis of reading engagement

Enjoyment of reading, diversity of reading and metacognitive awareness of reading strategies are cognitive and affective variables pertaining to three facets of reading engagement for students to read happily, widely and skilfully. These have been found to be related to effectiveness in reading instruction. They together form a focus for this study to examine the underlying student- and across-level mechanisms to explain gender differences in reading performance of Macao students. Drawing data from Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009 Study, the mediation effects of gender and the school’s gender composition on reading performance are analysed. Two findings are of both theoretical and pedagogical interests. Firstly, the three facets of reading engagement from the nurture perspective explain substantially the within-school gender gap. Secondly, in coeducation context where students read happily and skilfully, there are gender-specific peer influences across-level onto student reading performance. Implications for gender-inclusive reading instruction programmes are discussed.

Introduction to the special issue. Advancing the state-of-the-science in reading research through modeling

Reading research is increasingly a multi-disciplinary endeavor involving more complex, team-based science approaches. These approaches offer the potential of capturing the complexity of reading development, the emergence of individual differences in reading performance over time, how these differences relate to the development of reading difficulties and disability, and more fully understanding the nature of skilled reading in adults. This special issue focuses on the potential opportunities and insights that early and richly integrated advanced statistical and computational modeling approaches can provide to our foundational (and translational) understanding of reading. The issue explores how computational and statistical modeling, using both observed and simulated data, can serve as a contact point among research domains and topics, complement other data sources and critically provide analytic advantages over current approaches.

Reading performance, learning strategies, gender and school language as related issues – PISA 2009 findings in Finland and Estonia

Reading is considered an important skill not only for academic success, but also for active participation in society. International student literacy assessments report gender differences in reading performance in favour of girls. These reports also show that students from schools with a minority or majority language tend to perform differently: in PISA 2009 in well-performing Finland, the Swedish-speaking schools performed at a lower level compared to the Finnish-speaking schools; in Estonia, the Estonian-speaking schools outperformed the Russian-speaking schools, despite the tests having been translated into each language. How students learn is closely related to their results. In literacy, the more advanced thinking and learning skills known as metacognition enhance the results. Metacognitive awareness can be developed through instruction in the classroom, and this has also resulted in significant improvements for students with rather low learning abilities. As it is teachers? and schools? opportunity to help their students by teaching these skills, their awareness of useful strategies could presumably be dependent on the school. So far only the PISA 2009 study has included student awareness of different learning strategies; therefore, the data here enable us to analyse how learning strategies relate to reading, gender or school language. In the current paper, the issues of reading proficiency, learning strategies, gender and school language are considered jointly. Alongside the theoretical background, results from several analyses of PISA 2009 are discussed to show how student awareness and choice of different learning strategies could explain the variation in reading results in boys and girls at student and school levels, and predict their reading test results. The two-level modelling analysis was used as a research method, since it allows us to draw reasonable statistical inferences for regression-type analyses under a hierarchical data structure, and where the factor of individuals being influenced by the group they belong to is explicitly taken into account.Acknowledgements:This research was supported by European Social Fund's Doctoral Studies and Internationalization Programme DoRa, which is carried out by Foundation Archimedes, project 1.2.0401.09-0070.

Paired associate learning tasks and their contribution to reading skills

Associative learning has been identified as one of several non-linguistic processes involved in reading acquisition. However, it has not been established whether it is an independent process that contributes to reading performance on its own or whether it is a process that is embedded in other linguistic skills (e.g., phonological awareness or phonological memory) and, therefore, contributing to reading performance indirectly. Research has shown that performance on tasks assessing associative learning, e.g., paired-associate learning (PAL) tasks, is lower in children with specific reading difficulties compared to typical readers. We explored the differential associations of two distinct verbal–visual PAL tasks (the Bala Bbala Graphogame, BBG, and a Foreign Language Learning Task, FLLT) with reading skills (word reading and pseudo-word decoding), controlling for phonological awareness, rapid naming, and letter and digit span in children at risk for reading disabilities and their typically developing peers. Our study sample consisted of 110 children living in rural Zambia, ranging in age from 7 to 18years old (48.1% female). Multivariate analyses of covariance were used to explore the group differences in reading performance. Repeated-measures ANCOVA was used to examine children's learning across the PAL tasks. The differential relationships between both PAL tasks and reading performance were explored via structural equation modeling. The main result was that the children at risk for reading difficulties had lower performance on both PAL tasks. The BBG was a significant predictor for both word reading and pseudo-word decoding, whereas the FLLT—only for word reading. Performance on the FLLT partially mediated the association between phonological awareness and word reading. These results illustrate the partial independence of associative learning from other reading-related skills; the specifics of this relationship vary based on the type of PAL task administered.