Origins of Developmental and Individual Difference in Reading Comprehension Rick Wagner Florida State University and Florida Center for Reading Research

Rand Report View of Comprehension

Context of Assessment Existing measures…

Context of Assessment Existing measures… do a reasonable job of informing us that an individual is poor at reading comprehension.

Context of Assessment Existing measures… do a reasonable job of informing us that an individual is poor at reading comprehension. but fall short in informing us why an individual performs poorly, and what might be done to remedy poor performance.

Recommendations from NRC Report Knowing What Students Know 1. Assessments must be better grounded in models of cognition, learning, or development.

Recommendations from NRC Report Knowing What Students Know 1. Assessments must be better grounded in models of cognition, learning, or development. 2. Focus should be on assessment with implications for classroom, where teaching and learning occur, including technology-supported learning environments.

This One’s Not Sitting on a Shelf

What Happens if We Throw Both Reports in a Locked Room?

Grounding Assessment Reading comprehension is complex. A complete account must handle… A reader A purpose for reading A text All in a sociocultural context The obvious problem...

Focusing Even limiting to what goes ordinarily goes on in the head of a normal reader doing ordinary reading gives us…

Focusing Even limiting to what goes ordinarily goes on in the head of a normal reader doing ordinary reading gives us…every cognitive process ever studied.

More Focusing Many processes are not origins of substantial individual or developmental differences. Focus on things that: Account for appreciable variance. Might be implicated causally. Ideally influenced by instruction.

Overview Five Studies Converging Operations Causal modeling of longitudinal correlational data. Experimental manipulation. Begin to address implications of reading a virtual book.

Studies 1 and 2 Measurement model (Study 1) and 3-year longitudinal study (Study 2). Participants: 200 2nd grade and 200 4th grade All constructs measured with multiple indicators.

Constructs (Studies 1 and 2) Working Memory Reading span Listening span Visuo-spatial span Morphological Awareness Decomposition “Quickly. To win the race he had to be _____.” Derivation “Sudden. The bus stopped _______.”

Constructs (cont.) Vocabulary Decoding Accuracy Fluency

Outcomes Reading comprehension Listening comprehension Traditional standardized assessments. Woodcock passage comprehension. Gray Oral Experimental assessments. Answering literal and different kinds of inferential questions after reading grade-level passages. Listening comprehension As above.

Studies 3 and 4 Manipulation check (Study 3) and actual manipulation (Study 4). Participants 90 2nd and 90 4th Goal of training is not to increase skill in general, but knowledge of specific words in passages to be read.

Constructs to be Manipulated Decoding Accuracy Flashcard-like procedure used for incorrectly decoded words (Tan & Nicholson, 1997). Decoding Accuracy and Fluency Training will continue until list decoding rate average < .5 sec/word. Vocabulary Training based on Beck.

Groups 1. Decoding accuracy training. 2. Decoding accuracy and fluency training. 3. Vocabulary training. 4. Decoding accuracy plus vocabulary training. 5. Decoding accuracy and fluency plus vocabulary training. 6. Math facts training for control group.

Key Question What is required for gains in reading comprehension? Improving decoding accuracy? Improving decoding fluency? Improving vocabulary knowledge? Some combination of the above?

Study 5 Generic versus Passage-Specific Assessment. Participants: Is it worth the bother and time to do passage-specific? Participants: 100 2nd and 100 4th

Constructs (Study 5) Decoding Fluency Vocabulary Generic: TOWRE Passage-specific: pseudo-TOWRE using words from passages. Vocabulary Generic: Traditional standardized test. Passage-specific: Words taken from passages.

Key Analyses Hierarchical regression—what is added value of passage-specific over generic assessment information for predicting three outcomes? 1. Comprehension performance on target passages (from which passage-specific items were drawn). 2. Comprehension performance on similar passages. 3. Performance on standardized reading comprehension test.

Recommendations for Future Research Projects Focus of present study is on constructs that explain developmental and individual differences in the construct of reading comprehension. What remains is to unpack the construct of reading comprehension itself.

Unpacking Reading Comprehension What are key underlying dimensions that would need to be represented in a measure of reading comprehension? Important interface is that between educators’ goals as represented in standards, and research on inference, text processing, and memory from cognitive, developmental, and educational psychology.