RCC lab members Genna Companatico (‘20), Nicole Martin (‘21), and Aubrey Sahouria (‘22) were recently accepted to present their research at the 2020 Eastern Psychological Association (EPA) annual conference in Boston, MA. The in person portion of the conference was cancelled, the conference has been moved to a virtual platform that the lab will be participating in!
Nicole Martin will present her research on text comprehension across digital reading mediums. This study, combining elements from the lab’s 2017 work on reading comprehension on Kindle E-readers, sheds light on the effects of writing style (expository vs. narrative), content, and reading medium on text comprehension. Results from the study indicate that writing style plays a small role in comprehension, but content tends to be the determining factor in processing a passage. As for reading medium, comprehension for a Kindle Paperwhite and paper were equivalent, but performance seems to decline when using an iPad. These results indicate that if one chooses to read on a digital device, using one designed for reading may result in better comprehension.
Genna Companatico and Aubrey Sahouria will present their research on predicting reading performance across different text types. Their research compared three common reading tests (the Nelson Denny Reading Test, the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test, and the Multimedia Comprehension Battery) examining both narrative (i.e. a leisurely novel) and expository (i.e. a textbook) texts to find correlations between them and working memory capacity and metacomprehension. Their findings indicate correlations between all three tests and working memory, as well as two of the tests (Nelson Denny and Gates-MacGinitie) and metacomprehension. These results will allow educators to determine which test may best suit the skills they would like to test.
The RCC lab looks forward to sharing this work and can’t wait to see all that the virtual conference has to offer!