Tenaha O’Reilly

The impact of science knowledge, reading skill, and reading strategy knowledge on more traditional "high-stakes" measures of high school students' science achievement

This study examined how well cognitive abilities predict high school students’ science achievement as measured by traditional content-based tests. Students (n = 1,651) from four high schools in three states were assessed on their science knowledge, reading skill, and reading strategy knowledge. The dependent variable, content-based science achievement, was measured in terms of students’ comprehension of a science passage, science course grade, and state science test scores. The cognitive variables reliably predicted all three measures of science achievement, and there were also significant gender differences. Reading skill helped the learner compensate for deficits in science knowledge for most measures of achievement and had a larger effect on achievement scores for higher knowledge than lower knowledge students. Implications for pedagogy and science assessment are discussed.

Where's the difficulty in standardized reading tests: The passage or the question?

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the extent to which item and text characteristics predict item difficulty on the comprehension portion of the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests for the 7th–9th and 10th–12th grade levels. Detailed item-based analyses were performed on 192 comprehension questions on the basis of the cognitive processing model framework proposed by Embretson and colleagues (Embretson & Wetzel, 1987). Item difficulty was analyzed in terms of various passage features (e.g., word frequency and number of propositions) and individual-question characteristics (e.g., abstractness and degree of inferential processing), using hierarchical linear modeling. The results indicated that the difficulty of the items in the test for the 7th–9th grade level is primarily influenced by text features—in particular, vocabulary difficulty—whereas the difficulty of the items in the test for the 10th–12th grade level is less systematically influenced by text features.

Improving Comprehension Assessment for Middle and High School Students: Challenges and Opportunities

For decades, standardized reading comprehension tests have consisted of a series of passages and associated multiple-choice questions. Although widely used in and out of the classroom, there continues to be considerable disagreement regarding how or whether such tests have net value in the service of advancing educational progress in reading. This chapter begins with a review of features that characterize standardized reading assessments. In particular, we discuss how assessment designs and analytics reflect a balance of practical and measurement constraints. We then discuss how advances in the learning sciences, measurement, and electronic technologies have opened up the design space for a new generation of reading assessments. Abstracting from this review, we end by presenting some examples of prototype assessments that reflect opportunities for enhancing the value and utility of reading assessments in the future.

How Individual Differences Interact With Task Demands in Text Processing

ABSTRACT Reading is affected by both situational requirements and one’s cognitive skills. The current study investigated how individual differences interacted with task requirements to determine reading behavior and outcome. We recorded the eye movements of college students, who differed in reading efficiency, while they completed a multiple-choice (MC) comprehension test in two within-subject conditions: one in which they read passages and answered MC questions as in a typical reading test and one in which they wrote a summary before answering the MC questions. We found students spent longer time reading the text in the summary-writing condition, resulting in a benefit in the time they spent when answering MC questions. This time benefit was larger for students who had relatively low reading efficiency. These results demonstrated that both task requirements and individual differences can interact to affect reading behavior and performance. Implications for reading practice and assessment are discussed.

How do people read the passages during a reading comprehension test? The effect of reading purpose on text processing behavior

ABSTRACT In this study, we investigate the effect of reading purpose on students’ processing behavior during a reading comprehension test. In a repeated measures design, sixty undergraduates answered multiple-choice (MC) reading comprehension questions in a condition with no overarching goal for reading and in an alternate condition where the same students were first provided with the goal of summarizing the text before answering MC questions. Results from eye tracking analysis showed that when students read and answered questions without an overarching goal, they spent much less time reading the passages before answering the questions, more time re-reading the texts while answering the questions, and more time on parts of the text that were not necessary to answer the questions. We conclude that providing examinees without an explicit goal for reading may inadvertently encourage a “search for the answer” reading process, rather than on building a coherent mental model of text content.

2017 Society for Text and Discourse Conference Special Issue: Introductory Remarks

This special issue of Discourse Processes highlights work from the 27th annual meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from July 31 to August 2, 2017. It wa...

Comprehension in a Scenario-Based Assessment: Domain and Topic-Specific Background Knowledge

ABSTRACT Background knowledge is a strong predictor of reading comprehension, yet little is known about how different types of background knowledge affect comprehension. The study investigated the impacts of both domain and topic-specific background knowledge on students’ ability to comprehend and learn from science texts. High school students (n = 3,650) completed two background knowledge assessments, a pretest, comprehension tasks, and a posttest, in the context of the Global, Integrated, Scenario-based Assessment on ecosystems. Linear mixed-effects models revealed positive effects of background knowledge on comprehension and learning as well as an interactive effect of domain and topic-specific knowledge, such that readers with high domain knowledge but low topic-specific knowledge improved most from pretest to posttest. We discuss the potential implications of these findings for educational assessments and interventions.

Using Advances in Cognitive Science to Improve Students Study Skills and Reading Comprehension

National and international assessments of reading, science and math indicate that students and adults in the United States lag behind citizens of other developed nations. While there are multifaceted reasons for this lag, recent advances in cognitive science and technology have uncovered promising ways to intervene and help struggling students. This chapter will review recent developments from the cognitive literature that can potentially shed light on solutions for improving students study skills, as well as their general reading comprehension. We draw upon the available literature from reading strategy research and recent advances in assessment. Collectively, while this research indicates that the construct of reading has shifted; modern reading interventions are positioned to help prepare students for twenty-first century literacy activities.