EDMONTON
(CUP) – Many students are familiar with the phenomenon of doing their readings
for class and not being able to remember a single thing after. A University of Alberta
researcher may be able to tell you why, despite your best efforts at studying,
this happens to you.
George
Georgiou, director of the University of Alberta’s Reading Research Lab, has
identified cognitive development issues that cause some students to struggle
with reading comprehension – though their actual ability to read may be perfectly
fine.
By
studying a sample of roughly 500 U of A students, Georgiou found that a small
percentage had an undetected reading difficulty known as a specific reading
comprehension deficit. This deficit occurs when working memory doesn’t allow
for full comprehension of a text, even if a student can easily read it.
“These
students do not have a problem reading accurately and fluently. The problem is
how to understand what they are reading,” Georgiou says.
Georgiou
began the study in 2011 to see if the estimated rate of three to five per cent
who deal with this reading comprehension deficit could be found in a sample of
university students.
The
other goal of the study was to identify the causes of this reading difficulty.
Georgiou notes that when it comes to research on reading difficulties, experts
tend to focus on the early years of education: “We know much more about reading
difficulties in younger children, and not as much about reading difficulties in
older students.”
After
receiving a Cornerstone Grant from the Killam Research Fund, which supports innovations
that advance scholarship, Georgiou and colleague J.P. Das tested students in
large classes on two adult-appropriate reading comprehension tasks.
They
contacted the students who showed signs of a reading comprehension difficulty
to come in to the Reading Research Lab for further testing on other areas of
reading ability, before focusing on comprehension.
About
three to five per cent of the total sample of students showed signs of this
specific reading comprehension deficit, matching up with the rate going into
the study.
The
cause of this deficit, Georgiou says, lies in cognitive development. These
students lack the working memory to process, store, and understand what they
read, particularly if the text is long and contains complex ideas.
“We
administered measures of working memory, simultaneous and successive
processing, planning, and attention,” Georgiou explains. “Out of all these
measures, working memory stands out as a very important factor.”
The
reason this deficit often goes undetected is that strategies to identify
reading difficulties prior to post-secondary education deal mostly with areas
of reading ability, rather than comprehension.
The
study is ongoing, and the next step is to help the students in the study deal
with their reading comprehension difficulty through a number of simple
strategies: “There are no easy solutions, but there are some steps we can take to
help them improve their reading comprehension,”
Georgiou
says. “You will see that when some of these students were completing these comprehension
tasks, they would highlight the whole text, which is a very poor strategy.” Georgiou
suggests tackling the text paragraph by paragraph, finding the main ideas
before moving on to the next, and making connections between paragraphs.
Creating a concept map of the text’s main themes and making summarizing notes
in the margins are also useful strategies for working to understand what you’re
reading.
//Piper Whelan, The Gateway (University of Alberta)
//Piper Whelan, The Gateway (University of Alberta)
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