Metacomprehension skills depend on the type of text: An analysis from differential item functioning

Background: Metacomprehension skills determine an individual reader’s ability to judge their degree of learning and text comprehension and have considerable importance in their ability to learn from reading. Given that many comprehension processes are influenced by text characteristics, the aim of t...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: León Cascón, José Antonio, Martínez-Huertas, José Ángel, Olmos Albacete, Ricardo, Moreno Pérez, José David, Escudero, Inmaculada
Format: article
Publication Date:2019
Country:España
Institution:Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Repository:Biblos-e Archivo. Repositorio Institucional de la UAM
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.uam.es:10486/689864
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10486/689864
https://dx.doi.org/10.7334/psicothema2018.163
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:DIF analysis
Discontinuous text
Expository text
Metacomprehension
Narrative text
Reading comprehension
Psicología
Description
Summary:Background: Metacomprehension skills determine an individual reader’s ability to judge their degree of learning and text comprehension and have considerable importance in their ability to learn from reading. Given that many comprehension processes are influenced by text characteristics, the aim of the present study was to analyze whether different types of text have significant impact on metacomprehension skills at two different points in primary education. Method: A total of 823 students (4th and 6th years of primary school, 9 to 11 years old) read three different texts (narrative, expository and discontinuous texts) taken from ECOM-PLEC.Pri, a standardized Spanish test for reading comprehension (León, Escudero, & Olmos, 2012). Students were classified by their metacomprehension skills. A Differential Item Functioning (DIF) analysis was conducted in order to analyze whether the underlying reading comprehension and metacomprehension processes differed across text types. Results: Results showed a considerable divergence of performance for reading narrative texts as opposed to expository and discontinuous texts. These differences were related to academic level. Conclusion: Text characteristics such as the type of text can have a great impact on metacomprehension skills and, consequently, on learning.