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BackgroundOver the last two decades, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) resources have become widely available to students, both at home and at school. Due to the importance of ICT in our modern society, a questionnaire obtaining information about ICT resources, ICT use (both at school and outside school), and ICT skills AbstractPrevious research on the relationship between students' home and school Information and Communication Technology (ICT) resources and academic performance has shown ambiguous results. The availability of ICT resources at school has been found to be unrelated or negatively related to academic performance, whereas the availability of ICT resources at home has been found to be both positively and negatively related to academic performance. In addition, the frequency of use of ICT is related to students' academic achievement. This relationship has been found to be negative for ICT use at school, however, for ICT use at home the literature on the relationship with academic performance is again ambiguous. In addition to ICT availability and ICT use, students' attitudes towards ICT have also been found to play a role in student performance. In the present study, we examine how availability of ICT resources, students' use of those resources (at school, outside school for schoolwork, outside school for leisure), and students' attitudes toward ICT (interest in ICT, perceived ICT competence, perceived ICT autonomy) relate to individual differences in performance on a digital assessment of reading in one comprehensive model using the Dutch PISA 2015 sample of 5183 15-year-olds (49.2% male). Student gender and students' economic, social, and cultural status accounted for a substantial part of the variation in digitally assessed reading performance. Controlling for these relationships, results indicated that students with moderate access to ICT resources, moderate use of ICT at school or outside school for schoolwork, and moderate interest in ICT had the highest digitally assessed reading performance. In contrast, students who reported moderate competence in ICT had the lowest digitally assessed reading performance. In addition, frequent use of ICT outside school for leisure was negatively related to digitally assessed reading performance, whereas perceived autonomy was positively related. Taken together, the findings suggest that excessive access to ICT resources, excessive use of ICT, and excessive interest in ICT is associated with lower digitally assessed reading performance.

The mental lexicon plays a central role in reading comprehension (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014). It encompasses the number of lexical entries in spoken and written language (vocabulary breadth), the semantic quality of these entries (vocabulary depth), and the connection strength between lexical representations (semantic relatedness); as such, it serves as an output for the decoding process and as an input for comprehension processes. Although different aspects of the lexicon can be distinguished, research on the role of the mental lexicon in reading comprehension often does not take these individual aspects of the lexicon into account. The current study used a multicomponent approach to examine whether measures of spoken and written vocabulary breadth, vocabulary depth, and semantic relatedness were differentially predictive of individual differences in reading comprehension skills in fourth-grade students. The results indicated that, in addition to nonverbal reasoning, short-term memory, and word decoding, the four measures of lexical quality substantially added (30 %) to the proportion of explained variance of reading comprehension (adding up to a total proportion of 65 %). Moreover, each individual measure of lexical quality added significantly to the prediction of reading comprehension after all other measures were taken into account, with written lexical breadth and lexical depth showing the greatest increase in explained variance. It can thus be concluded that multiple components of lexical quality play a role in children’s reading comprehension.

In a longitudinal study, we investigated how cognitive precursors (short-term memory, working memory, and nonverbal reasoning) influence the developmental relation between lexical quality (decoding and vocabulary) and reading comprehension skill in 282 Dutch students in the intermediate elementary grades (mean age at start Grade 4 was 9; 7 years) as these grades mark an important transition point in the development of reading comprehension skill. Analyses revealed strong autoregressive effects for the linguistic measures. Moreover, evidence was found for a reciprocal relation between vocabulary and reading comprehension. Direct concurrent relations were evidenced between short-term memory and decoding, and between working memory and reasoning, on the one hand, and reading comprehension and vocabulary, on the other hand. Finally, we found direct and indirect influences of nonverbal reasoning and working memory capacity on reading comprehension and vocabulary development. The results highlight the importance of both lexical and cognitive factors in reading comprehension development.

Many recent studies have aimed to demonstrate that specific types of reading comprehension depend on different underlying cognitive abilities. In these studies, it is often implicitly assumed that reading comprehension is a multidimensional construct. The general aim of this study was to examine the dimensionality of a large pool of reading comprehension items differing according to text and question type. The items were administered to 996 fourth-grade children. We used multitrait, multimethod modeling to test for the existence of specific text and question types. In addition, the correlations of factor scores, reflecting the different measures of reading comprehension, with word reading speed, vocabulary, and working memory were examined. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed that the specific measures of comprehension, differing according to text and question type, hardly reflected systematic variation, after a general factor of reading comprehension was taken into account. Reading comprehension items thus largely reflect a common factor. Factor scores that were supposed to reflect specific comprehension factors were not reliable and were hardly related to word reading speed, vocabulary, and working memory.