Assessment of Students’ Higher-level Text Comprehension Skills in Basic School

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Published: Nov 15, 2016
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2016-11-15 (2)

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Triinu Kärbla
University of Tartu, Institute of Education, Salme 1a, Tartu 50103, Estonia
Krista Uibu
University of Tartu, Institute of Education, Salme 1a, Tartu 50103, Estonia

Abstract

Text comprehension is a sophisticated process that is influenced by the reader’s cognitive skills, prior knowledge and the type of texts. The aim of the present longitudinal study was to assess the students’ ability to analyse and evaluate the narrative text in Grades 4 and 5. A total of 831 Estonian students were tested in two consecutive years. The results indicated that fewer than half of the students succeeded in analysing and evaluating the contents of the text, while the students’ text comprehension skills in Grade 5 were significantly better than in Grade 4. Students had more difficulties answering the questions that examined their skill of evaluating the text, compared to their ability to analyse the text. This led to the conclusion that teachers should pay more attention to the students’ higher-level cognitive processes and support their text comprehension skills.

 

Keywords: Analysis and evaluation skills; Basic school; Reading; Text comprehension

 

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How to Cite
Kärbla, T., & Uibu, K. (2016). Assessment of Students’ Higher-level Text Comprehension Skills in Basic School. New Trends and Issues Proceedings on Humanities and Social Sciences, 2(5). Retrieved from https://un-pub.eu/ojs/index.php/pntsbs/article/view/1080 (Original work published January 12, 2017)
Issue
Vol. 2 No. 5 (2016): Selected Papers of 4th Cyprus International Conference on Educational Research (CYICER-2015)
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Articles
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