Reading comprehension assessment: Effect of order of task application

Abstract

Purpose: To investigate the influence of order of reading tasks application on the reading comprehension performance by students with and without reading difficulties. Methods: 40 students (4th and 5th grade) were classified according to the presence (Research Group-RG) or absence (Control Group-CG) of reading difficulties. RG-r and CG-r - 20 students (10 for each group) who retold the read text and responded to open-ended questions; RG-q and CG-q - 20 students (10 for each group) who responded to open-ended questions and then retold the read text. The analysis quantified the main idea, details and inferences retold, causal links and retelling reference standard (3-0) was also established from the best to the worst performance. Open-ended questions received one point for each correct answer. Results: Open-ended questions influenced only the retelling performance of good readers. A better performance of CG-q was noted for the number of second level links retold (U=50.50, p=0.155), total of links retold (U=23,00, p=0.038) and retelling reference standard (U=24.50, p=0.039). Reading-monitoring strategies are laborious and tend to be less used by students with reading difficulties. This is because these compete directly with low-level skills (decoding and microstructure processing), losing efficiency or being abandoned in the very course of reading. Conclusion: There was improvement on the retelling performance of students without reading difficulties when this task was preceded by the open-ended questions, possibly because of the use of monitoring strategies that allowed a better understanding of the link between the retained ideas, improving links and retelling reference standard.