There are many established reading strategy training programmes, which explicitly teach strategic and meta-cognitive knowledge to improve reading comprehension. Although instruction in strategy knowledge leads to improvements in meta-cognitive skills, the effects do not always transfer to reading comprehension. Therefore, to investigate preconditions for knowledge transfer, two different strategy training programmes were implemented in nine classes of Grade 6 students (N ϭ 148) over the course of one school year. One programme involved teacher-directed instruction of declarative meta-cognitive knowledge (Reading Detectives; Rühl & Souvignier, 2006). The other aimed at improving executive meta-cognition by guided practice: students worked with a computer program based on latent semantic analysis (LSA) (conText) and received immediate feedback on written summaries. Although both groups improved their strategy knowledge to the same extent, the conText group showed a greater improvement in reading comprehension. These fi ndings suggest that guided practice, which is characterised by intensive practice and individualised corrective feedback, is superior to explicitly teaching strategy knowledge.

This study investigates the potential of a software tool based on Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA; Landauer, McNamara, Dennis, & Kintsch, 2007) to automatically evaluate complex German texts. A sample of N = 94 German university students provided written answers to questions that involved a high amount of analytical reasoning and evaluation. LSA-based evaluations were compared to evaluations of six human graders. Results showed that LSA-based evaluations agreed as well with human graders as human graders agreed with each other. Agreement of human graders and LSA-based evaluations did not differ depending on the standard of comparison used by LSA, that is, whether scoring was based on one single text ("gold standard") or on a sample of previously scored assignments ("nearest neighbors"). Moreover, LSA-based evaluations of students' assignments predicted students' results in a final exam. These results show that LSA can support university teachers in giving feedback and grading complex German texts.

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Zusammenfassung:In einer Gruppe von N = 210 Hauptschülerinnen und -schülern der 6. Klasse verglichen wir die Effekte der computerunterstützten Leseverständnisförderung conText mit einer etablierten Leseverständnisintervention («Wir werden Lesedetektive») und einer unbehandelten Kontrollgruppe im Laufe eines Schuljahres. conText ist ein intelligentes tutorielles System, das die Qualität von Textzusammenfassungen mithilfe von Verfahren aus dem Bereich der automatischen Sprachverarbeitung bewertet und an die Schüler zurückmeldet. Im Vergleich zu einer unbehandelten Kontrollgruppe verbesserten beide Interventionen das Lesestrategiewissen, jedoch erwies sich nur conText im Hinblick auf die Verbesserung des Leseverständnisses als erfolgreich. Die Ergebnisse werden im Hinblick auf die Rahmenbedingungen von Leseverständnisinterventionen diskutiert.