Welcome to the Reading Research Recap!
I am Dr. Neena Saha, Research Advisor at MetaMetrics. My focus is bridging the research-practice gap so that you can access useful resources that support reading success, expand awareness of the latest reading research, and inform your teaching and learning strategies. This monthly compendium offers the most relevant and must-read research impacting the reading and learning landscape, including easy-to-view, digestible highlights. We want the data and findings to be as useful to you as possible, so please do connect with me with any ideas and comments for next month. Enjoy the latest Reading Research Recap!
📚 Deep Dive: Can Personalizing Text to a Reader’s Name Help Comprehension?
Happy Back-to-School Season! I hope everyone has a great start to the new school year! This month I chose this cool study on text personalization: Personalizing text by using readers’ names – effects on reading comprehension and social agency.
Background
The study investigated whether personalizing narrative texts by using elementary school students’ names as the protagonist would improve reading comprehension and social agency, extending previous personalization research that focused mainly on expository texts and older learners.
Methods & Sample
- 96 fourth-grade German elementary school students were randomly assigned to read either a personalized narrative (where the protagonist shared their first name) or a non-personalized control version
- Reading comprehension was measured through standardized text recall and transfer tasks
Results
Students who read the personalized text showed significantly higher text transfer performance (but not higher text recall scores). The authors believe this could be due to the more complex nature of text transfer tasks:
“A reason for this difference is often seen in the more complex requirements in solving transfer compared to recall tasks (Ginns et al., 2013). The more effort and the deeper the processing required to solve a task, the more these processes seemed to benefit from increased motivation due to personalized text (Mayer, 2014a, 2014b; Author).”
Take-Home Message
While there were limitations with this study, personalizing reading materials by using students’ names can help inexperienced readers become more engaged with texts:
“In conclusion, the findings provide empirical evidence that personalizing reading materials by using the reader’s first name enhances children’s text transfer performance. This approach can inform the design of effective reading materials for elementary school students to better support immediate text accessibility and thereby support the development of their text comprehension abilities.”
Alright, that’s all that I have for this month’s recap!
Professional Development, Commentary, Policy, etc.
- Thoughts on the Definition of Dyslexia
- IDEA at 50—Progress, Equity, and the Work Ahead: The Editor
- SLD Models and Assessment Data Sources: Effects on Identification and Confidence
- The Science of Reading on Social Media: TikTok Content Creators’ Discourse Patterns and Bodies of Knowledge
- Teacher Professional Development for Reading: A Review of the State of the Research
- Legislating Literacy at the State Level: Six Considerations for Supporting Students With Disabilities
- Reframing dyslexia: language and linguistic complexity, developmental risk, and the future of science of reading policy
Foundational Skills
- Is the Role of Set for Variability in Word Reading Influenced by Conditions Leading to Partial Decoding?
- Assessing Early Writing in Preschool: Attention to Early Writing Tasks and Component Skills
- Visual Word Recognition
- Electrophysiological activity predicts children’s reading ability through orthographic awareness: Evidence from a cross-sectional and longitudinal study
- Early literacy and executive function profiles in Spanish-English emergent bilinguals
- Self-Determination to Accelerate Response to Reading Intervention for Elementary-Aged Students: First, We Set a Goal!
- A Meta-Analytic Review of Spelling Interventions for Students With or At-Risk for Learning Disabilities
- Word learning in children with developmental language disorder: A meta-analysis testing the encoding hypothesis
- A Network Meta-analysis of Multi-component Reading Interventions for Students with Reading Difficulties: Active-Ingredient vs. Ingredient-Interaction?
- Effects of Heterogeneous Versus Homogeneous Grouping of English Learners’ Language and Literacy Development: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial (Open Access)
- Helping Children Achieve Literacy Proficiency: A Case Study
- Children’s Improvement After Language and Rhythm Training With the Digital Medical Device Poppins for Dyslexia: Single-Arm Intervention Study
- A Formative Evaluation of a Combined Reading and Emotional-Behavioral Intervention (Dissertation, not yet peer-reviewed)
- Can ASR generate valid measures of child reading fluency?
- Asset-Based Implementation of Structured Adaptations in an Online Third-Grade Content Literacy Intervention (Open Access)
- Feasibility of Adapting the UFLI Foundations Tier 1 Reading Curriculum for Homeschool Instruction With a Struggling Reader: A Case Study (Dissertation, not yet peer-reviewed)
Comprehension
- Contribution of executive function to different levels of reading comprehension (Open Access)
- Rapid semantic processing: an MEG study of narrative text reading
- Developing Reading Strategies Through Technology-Based Intervention
- Development of the retrieval of word meanings and its impact on reading comprehension throughout elementary school: A longitudinal study
- Toward a Consensus Model of Cognitive–Reading Achievement Relations Using Meta-Structural Equation Modeling
- Investigating grade-level and text genre effects in Quality Talk discussions: An AI-powered discourse analysis of upper primary students’ high-level comprehension
- The Face of Fluent Reading: Using Eye Tracking and Spectrographic Analysis of Prosody to Predict Comprehension (Dissertation, not yet peer-reviewed)
- The Role of Hang-Out Ties in Reading Comprehension and Small Group Interactions for Multilingual Students
- The Role of Anxiety on Reading Comprehension in the Context of Socioemotional and
- Cognitive Risk and Promotive Factors
- Looking closer at reading comprehension
- Effective Literacy Strategies for Males in a High Poverty Rural School District: A Case Study (Dissertation, not yet peer-reviewed)
- Seeing emerging comprehenders: Refining reading comprehension assessment in international contexts
- Relationship Between Reading Pretest and Social Studies Outcomes From PACT: Evidence for a Skill-by-Treatment Interaction
- Promotive and Protective Effects of Cognitive, Motivational, and Parental Factors on Reading Fluency and Reading Comprehension in Grade 9
Motivation
- Demotivated, but still attentive: Text disfluency does not affect mind-wandering and reading comprehension, but reduces motivation
- Reading Intervention for Students With Autism in Grades 4 Through 8: Addressing Individualized Needs With 1:1 Tutoring
- Technical Features of Sentence-Level Curriculum-Based Measures and Language Sample Analysis for Students With Writing Difficulties
- Enhancing Reading Through Olfactory Stimuli: A Research Agenda to Support Struggling Readers (Open Access)
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