EDMONTON (CUP) – Researchers at the University of Alberta have identified cognitive development issues that cause some students to struggle with reading comprehension, though their ability to read may be perfectly fine.
George Georgiou, director of the U of A’s Reading Research Lab, studied samples of roughly 500 U of A students and found that a small percentage had an undetected reading difficulty known as a specific reading comprehension deficit.
This deficit occurs when working memory doesn’t allow for full comprehension of a text, even if a student can easily read it.
“These students do not have a problem reading accurately and fluently. The problem is how to understand what they are reading,” says Georgiou.
Georgiou began the study in 2011 to see if the estimated rate of three to five percent who deal with this reading comprehension deficit could be found in a sample of university students.
The other goal of the study was to identify the causes of this reading difficulty.
Georgiou notes that when it comes to research on reading difficulties, experts tend to focus on the early years of education.
“We know much more about reading difficulties in younger children, and not as much about reading difficulties in older students,” he says.
Georgiou and colleague J.P. Das tested students in large classes on two adult-appropriate reading comprehension tasks.
The cause of this deficit, Georgiou says, lies in cognitive development.
These students lack the working memory to process, store, and understand what they read, particularly if the text they’re reading is long and if it contains complex ideas.
“We administered measures of working memory, simultaneous and successive processing, planning, and attention,” explains Georgiou. “Out of all these measures, working memory stands out as a very important factor.”
The reason this deficit often goes undetected is that strategies to identify reading difficulties prior to postsecondary education deal mostly with areas of reading ability rather than areas of reading comprehension.
The study is ongoing, and the next step is to help the students in the study deal with their reading comprehension difficulty through a number of simple strategies.
“There are no easy solutions” says Georgiou, “but there are some steps we can take to help them improve their reading comprehension.”