With primary and high school students, printed comprehension ability, basic Internet skills, and navigation behavior contributed to digital comprehension.
Research has also found that students, when reading digitally, tend to discard familiar print-based strategies for boosting comprehension.
Some Web evangelists say children should be evaluated for their proficiency on the Internet just as they are tested on their print reading comprehension.
So far, the traditionalists have held sway: The next round, to be administered to fourth and eighth graders in 2009, will test only print reading comprehension.
Researchers are working to get a clearer sense of the differences between online and print reading — comprehension, for starters, seems better with paper — and are grappling with what these differences could mean not only for enjoying the latest Pat Conroy novel but for understanding difficult material at work and school.
For a student with a basic ability to decode print, a reading-comprehension test is not chiefly a test of formal techniques but a test of background knowledge.
Traditional research on printed expository text comprehension in college level readers has shown that individual differences in previous domain knowledge, verbal ability, and metacognitive strategies contribute to comprehension (Graesser et al., 2002).
Students will learn the concept of print, basic phonetic principles, reading comprehension, letter identification skills, and understand that letters represent sounds.
Don't assign comprehension questions or print quizzes.
A recent study by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop found that, although enhanced e-books are better at engaging children, they're less effective for reading-comprehension skills than print editions.
