The reading comprehension abilities of dyslexic students in higher education

Abstract

The reading comprehension abilities of a group of dyslexic university students were compared with those of non-dyslexic university students. A 655-word passage, followed by literal and inferential questions, was used to measure reading comprehension. The text was designed to be syntactically complex, yet place relatively modest demands on decoding skills. Although dyslexic students performed at a similar level to the non-dyslexic students on the literal questions, their performance on the inferential questions was poorer. An index of the participants' ability to make inferences was calculated by subtracting the inferential question score from the literal question score. The groups differed significantly on this measure, indicating that the dyslexic students were specifically impaired in constructing inferences when processing complex text. It was concluded that dyslexic students in higher education have reading comprehension difficulties that cannot be accounted for by an inability to decode individual words in the text. The possible contribution that poor lexical automaticity and an impaired working memory make to this impairment is discussed. The implications for the assessment and support of dyslexic students are considered.

The relationship between learning styles and cognitive traits – Getting additional information for improving student modelling

“…Describing dyslexia … [as a working memory deficit] … can help explain both the persisting writing language difficulties" (p. 16), as a rationale to explain why low working memory would cause problem in reading comprehension. This rationale is in agreement with Simmons and Singleton's (2000) view that the cause of inability to solve inferential problems (and thus dyslexia) is due to insufficient working memory capacity. Comprehension of text would certainly be undermined by insufficient capacity to buffer what was read before.…”

“…The term dyslexia refers to specific learning difficulty regarding written language (Jeffries and Everatt, 2004). Simmons and Singleton (2000) studied a group of dyslexic university students by comparing their reading comprehension ability with non-dyslexic students, and found that "dyslexic students were specifically impaired in constructing inferences when processing complex text" (p. 178). No difference was found between the dyslexic and non-dyslexic groups when literal questions, which only required information that was explicitly stated in the text, were given.…”

“…However, significant differences were found when inferential questions were given, which required the students to integrate more than one piece of information or use their prior knowledge to interpret an ambiguous statement. Dyslexic students did not do very well in inferential questions and the cause was found to be working memory deficiency (Simmons and Singleton, 2000). Beacham, Szumko, and Alty (2003) pointed out that dyslexics have weakness also in other cognitive abilities including short-term memory, sound processing, co-ordination and motor skills, and visual processing.…”

“…All students performed the ILS questionnaire in order to provide information about their learning styles. As argued by Simmons and Singleton (2000) citing Beech, 1997;Hanley, 1997;Nicolson and Fawcett, 1997;and Palmer, 2000, dyslexics have impaired working memory capacity.…”

Measuring text simplification with the crowd

“…the comprehension of people with dyslexia [47]. Similarly, Rello et al [44] demonstrate how text containing longs words were less understandable by people with dyslexia than the same texts when the long words were substituted by shorter synonyms.…”