Classification of Students with Reading Comprehension Difficulties: The Roles of Motivation, affect, and Psychopathology

Abstract

Attempts to evaluate the cognitive-motivational profiles of students with reading comprehension difficulties have been scarce. The purpose of the present study was twofold: (a) to assess the discriminatory validity of cognitive, motivational, affective, and psychopathological variables for identification of students with reading difficulties, and (b) to profile students with and without reading comprehension difficulties across those variables. Participants were 87 students who scored more than 1.3 SD below the mean on a standardized reading comprehension battery and 500 typical students in grades 2 through 4. Results using linear discriminant analyses indicated that students with reading comprehension difficulties could be accurately predicted by low cognitive skills and high competitiveness. Using cluster analysis, students with significant deficits in reading comprehension were mostly assigned to a low skill/low motivation group (termed helpless) or a low skill/high motivation group (termed motivated low achievers). Based on these findings, it was concluded that motivation, emotions, and psychopathology play a pivotal role in explaining the achievement tendencies of students with reading comprehension difficulties.

The Effect of Post-Teaching Activity Type on Vocabulary Learning of Elementary EFL Learners

“…A factor in students' willingness to allocate their time and effort is their interest and motivation (Sideridis, Mouzaki, Simos, and Protopapas, 2006). Word games are obviously helpful because they can make the student feel that certain words are important and necessary because without those words the object of game cannot be achieved.…”

Reading motivational differences among groups: Reading disability (RD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), RD+ADHD, and typical comparison

“…Most research on motivation had examined typically developing children, rather than children with or at-risk for disabilities (Cox & Guthrie, 2001;Sideridis, Mouzaki, Simos, & Protopapas, 2006). However, there is recent evidence to suggest that motivation may be even more important for children with poor reading skills (Logan, Medford, & Hughes, 2011).…”

Prototyping Visual Learning Analytics Guided by an Educational Theory Informed Goal

“…More specifically, students with learning disabilities read 3.4 grade levels below their peers without disabilities (NJCLD, 2008;NLTS II, 2003;Wagner et al, 2003;Edmonds et al, 2009;Gajria, Jitendra, Sood, & Sacks, 2007). In addition, many students with learning disabilities experience significant social and emotional strain in school, hold negative emotions about reading, and exhibit low motivation for reading including text avoidant behaviour (Bryan & Bryan, 1983;Maag & Behrens, 1989;Margalit & Raviv, 1984;Sideridis, Mouzaki, Simos, & Protopapas, 2006;Sutherland & Singh, 2004). These findings are concerning because, by middle school, academic outcomes become inexorably linked to students' independent ability to learn from text and then express what they know through text (Murnane & Levy, 1996;Biancarosa & Snow, 2006;Perfetti, Landi, & Oakhill, 2005).…”