{"id":2388,"date":"2012-02-22T14:25:43","date_gmt":"2012-02-22T22:25:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=2388"},"modified":"2012-03-01T14:51:35","modified_gmt":"2012-03-01T22:51:35","slug":"researchers-discover-lack-in-student-reading-comprehension","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2012\/02\/22\/researchers-discover-lack-in-student-reading-comprehension\/","title":{"rendered":"Researchers discover lack in student reading comprehension"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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Some students lack reading comprehension (photo Austinevan\/Flickr Creative Commons).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

George Georgiou, director of the U of A\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

This deficit occurs when working memory doesn\u2019t allow for full comprehension of a text, even if a student can easily read it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese students do not have a problem reading accurately and fluently. The problem is how to understand what they are reading,\u201d says Georgiou.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The other goal of the study was to identify the causes of this reading difficulty.<\/p>\n

Georgiou notes that when it comes to research on reading difficulties, experts tend to focus on the early years of education.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know much more about reading difficulties in younger children, and not as much about reading difficulties in older students,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Georgiou and colleague J.P. Das tested students in large classes on two adult-appropriate reading comprehension tasks.<\/p>\n

The cause of this deficit, Georgiou says, lies in cognitive development.<\/p>\n

These students lack the working memory to process, store, and understand what they read, particularly if the text they\u2019re reading is long and if it contains complex ideas.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe administered measures of working memory, simultaneous and successive processing, planning, and attention,\u201d explains Georgiou. \u201cOut of all these measures, working memory stands out as a very important factor.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are no easy solutions\u201d says Georgiou, \u201cbut there are some steps we can take to help them improve their reading comprehension.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s Reading Research Lab, studied samples of roughly 500 U of A students and found that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2542,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-february-22-2012"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2388"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2543,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2388\/revisions\/2543"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}