Reading comprehension in elementary school children: cognitive studies of the reader, the text, and the task

Reading comprehension is a multifaceted skillset important to acquire in order to participate in modern society; to learn at school, for work related communication, for social digitized interactions, and to keep up to date with news. Important developmental change in this skillset occurs between the ages of 9 and 12, when elementary school children go from learning to read to reading to learn. In this phase educators start expecting the children to use their reading comprehension skillset to gather knowledge about many different topics. This knowledge helps children in understanding their current surroundings as well as prepares them for future possibilities of employment. However, children are of course not alone on their journey to become proficient readers. A great deal of research and educational resources are mobilized to help them on their way. With this doctoral dissertation I aim to enlarge the scientific knowledge of reading comprehension and aid educational practitioners who ground their pedagogical work in scientific literature. This gathering of four empirical papers presents research from a cognitive scientific perspective on three elements that are important to understand reading comprehension in children: the reader, the text, and the task.Development Psychopathology in context: schoo

Neural correlates of coherence-break detection during reading of narratives

Article / Letter to editorInstituut Pedagogische Wetenschappe

Neural correlates of coherence-break detection during reading of narratives

Development Psychopathology in context: schoo

Reading comprehension in elementary school children: cognitive studies of the reader, the text, and the task

Reading comprehension is a multifaceted skillset important to acquire in order to participate in modern society; to learn at school, for work related communication, for social digitized interactions, and to keep up to date with news. Important developmental change in this skillset occurs between the ages of 9 and 12, when elementary school children go from learning to read to reading to learn. In this phase educators start expecting the children to use their reading comprehension skillset to gather knowledge about many different topics. This knowledge helps children in understanding their current surroundings as well as prepares them for future possibilities of employment. However, children are of course not alone on their journey to become proficient readers. A great deal of research and educational resources are mobilized to help them on their way. With this doctoral dissertation I aim to enlarge the scientific knowledge of reading comprehension and aid educational practitioners who ground their pedagogical work in scientific literature. This gathering of four empirical papers presents research from a cognitive scientific perspective on three elements that are important to understand reading comprehension in children: the reader, the text, and the task.</p

Profiles of young readers: Evidence from thinking aloud while reading narrative and expository texts

This study aimed to identify reading behavior profiles in nine-to-eleven year old children based on their think-aloud responses while reading narrative and expository texts. Three profiles emerged while reading narratives: Literal Readers, who stay close to the literal text by predominantly repeating it; Paraphrasing Readers, who extract meaning from the text by paraphrasing it; and Elaborating Readers, who use background knowledge to explain the text by generating inferences. The three profiles also emerged while reading expository text. Children generally exhibited the same profiles across the two text genres, however, expository texts elicited fewer correct inferences but more invalid inferences than did narratives, suggesting that children are influenced by text demands. Elaborating Readers had better word decoding skills, reading comprehension ability, and non-verbal reasoning ability than readers of the two other profiles, indicating a positive relation between inference generation and language abilities and cognitive resources.</p