Effects on children's achievement and curiosity of variations in learner control over an interactive video lesson

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of variations in learner control on children's level of curiosity and learning from computer-based interactive video (CBIV). The content was presented as a videodisc visit to an art museum and contained both facts and concepts. A posttest-only control group design was employed with 101 first-and second-grade subjects randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions—Program Control, Learner Control, Learner Control with Advisement—or a control group. The dependent variables were achievement and three measures of curiosity. Children in the Learner Control with Advisement group scored significantly higher on the achievement posttest than the Learner Control subjects or control group. No differences were found between the Program Control and either of the Learner Control groups. For the curiosity measures, the Learner Control with Advisement subjects scored significantly higher than the control group on Content Exploration, and the subjects in the control group scored significantly higher than those in the Program Control group on Persistence.     

Stichwort: PISA-E

Ohne Zusammenfassung      

The role of IQ, expertise, and motivation in the recall of familiar information

High- and low-IQ children in the first, third, and fifth grades performed two free-recall tasks: a sort-recall task with sets of categorically related pictures, and a class-recall task, with children recalling the current members of their school class. All children were deemed to be experts concerning the composition of their school class, but, unlike experts in other domains, had no special motivation associated with their expertise. Recall and clustering on both tasks were high. The high-IQ children performed better than low-IQ children only on the sort-recall task. IQ was significantly correlated with measures of performance on the sort-recall task but not on the class-recall task. The results reflect the fact that the memory benefits associated with being an expert (here, elimination of IQ effects) are related to the greater knowledge the expert possesses and not to factors of motivation.     

Components of reading comprehension and scholastic achievement

The aim of this study was to understand whether the reading comprehension process is better explained by a single or by multiple factors. 184 students (9 to 13 years old) were presented with a recently devised battery of tests, that measure ten aspects of reading comprehension. Structural equation modelling showed that a two factors model better accounts for the data compared to a one or a three factors model. Results confirmed the hypothesis which distinguishes between ‘basic’ and ‘complex’ aspects of reading comprehension. The second goal of the study was to analyze the relationship between the two-components model and scholastic achievement. Our results highlighted that the more ‘complex’ aspects of reading comprehension, reflecting some metacognitive knowledge and control processes, are the better predictors of scholastic achievement.     

Fostering the Development of Reading Skill through Supplemental Instruction: Results for Hispanic and Non-Hispanic Students

This paper reports the effects of a two-year supplemental reading program for kindergarten through third grade students that focused on the development of decoding skills and reading fluency. Two hundred ninety-nine students were identified for participation and were randomly assigned to the supplemental instruction or to a no-treatment control group. Participants' reading ability was assessed in the fall, before the first year of the intervention, and again in the spring of years 1, 2, 3, and 4. At the end of the two-year intervention, students who received the supplemental instruction performed significantly better than their matched controls on measures of entry level reading skills (i.e., letter-word identification and word attack), oral reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The benefits of the instruction were still clear two years after instruction had ended with students in the supplemental-instruction condition still showing significantly greater growth on the measure of oral reading fluency. Hispanic students benefited from the supplemental reading instruction in English as much as or more than non-Hispanic students. Results support the value of supplemental instruction focused on the development of word recognition skills for helping students at risk for reading failure.     

Speech perception and speech production as indicators of reading difficulty

In order to investigate the relation between reading accuracy and speech processing, 20 children from grades 2 and 3 who were skilled in reading were compared with 20 less skilled readers on a speech perception and production task. The two groups of readers were indistinguishable in their production of the two-syllable words dippy, deepy, tippy, and teepy and in their perception of the stop consonants /d/ versus /t/. Less skilled readers were significantly less accurate than the skilled readers in a vowel identification task involving the lax and tense high vowels /i/ and /i/. The error pattern for vowel identification was similar across groups, with both groups making fewer errors when short and longer segments were alternated. The results imply that vowel phonemes are less securely represented in the perceptual system of less skilled readers than are consonant phonemes. In addition, the results raise the possibility that a selective perceptual impairment underlies at least some of the phonemic awareness problems that have been associated with poor reading.