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Reading more, understanding less - research on speed reading and comprehensionIncrease your reading speed two tothree times with no loss of comprehension! Is such a claim valid? Psychologists Marcel Just, Patricia A. Carpenter and Michael Masson think not, especially if complex or unfamiliar material is involved. They compared the reading abilities of three groups who read passages presented on a television monitor: eleven people who had completed a seven-week Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics course, 12 who were told to "skim` and 13 others who read at average rates. Each group read both relativelyeasy and difficult passages. The readers then briefly summarized the passages and answered 10 general and 10 detailed questions about each one. Just, Carpenter and Masson reportthat the speed-readers covered the material quickly, averaging almost 700 words per minute. The skimmers were timed at about 600 wpm and the average readers at 240 wpm. But speed hurt comprehension. On the relatively easy material, thespeed-readers answered only 65 percent of the general and 29 percent of the specific questions correctly. Average readers answered 80 percent of the general and 48 percent of the specific questions correctly. On the more diffficult reading, average readers got half of the general questions correct, while speed-readers could manage just one in three. Both groups had trouble with the specific questions in the difficult passages, but the average readers still out-scored the speed-readers 23 percent to 17 percent. On all of the tests, skimmers answered questions about as well as did speed-readers. The researchers also tracked eyemovements to learn how speed-reading works. They found that for both passages, the speed-readers focused on approximately one-third of the words and spent about 230 milliseconds on each, while average readers paused on twice as many words for an average of 330 milliseconds apiece. Skimmers, again, were similar to speed-readers. Speed-reading may work well witheasy or familiar material, the researchers say, but can lead to problems with dense or unfamiliar passages. Also, since speed-readers spend less time on words, they probably stop mulling over some of the more complicated words too soon to comprehend them. "If you need to fully understand apassage you`re better off reading normally than skimming,` Just says, "and even if you are a trained speed-reader, you might want to read normally, especially on difficult material.` Marcel Just, Ph.D., and Patricia A.Carpenter, Ph.D., are at Carnegie-Mellon University. They have published some of these results in The Psychology of Reading and Language Comprehension (Allyn & Bacon, 1987). Michael Masson, Ph.D., is at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. COPYRIGHT 1987 Sussex Publishers, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group Does a Visual-Orthographic Deficit Contribute to Reading Disability? Annals of Dyslexia , Jun 2005 by Badian, Nathlie A Continued from page 7.Previous|NextPhonological awareness and naming speed were significantly correlated with all IQ and reading measures, and phonological awareness also correlated significantly with verbal short-term memory. In addition to its significant correlations with reading, visual-orthographic skills correlated significantly with naming speed and phonological awareness, but not with verbal short-term memory or the IQ measures. Phonological awareness had the highest correlation of any nonreading variable with a reading measure (nonword reading: r = .62). As nonword reading requires phonological decoding, the strength of this correlation suggests that the phoneme deletion test administered, although including only 13 items, is a reasonably sensitive measure of phonemic awareness. HIERARCHICAL REGRESSION ANALYSES Hierarchical regression analyses were performed to determine the unique variance contributed to reading measures by the visual-orthographic measure. Age, verbal IQ, and verbal shortterm memory were entered first, second, and third into each analysis, to control for the effects of these variables on reading performance. In order to define as precisely as possible the unique contributions of the visual-orthographic measure to reading, phonological awareness and naming speed were also entered into the regression analyses. In the first analysis, the visualorthographic measure was entered sixth, following phonological awareness and naming speed. In the next two analyses, phonological awareness and naming speed were each entered sixth, in order to compare their contributions with that of the visual-orthographic task. Age, verbal IQ, and verbal short-term memory (Digit Span) together accounted for 19% of the variance in word reading, 24% in reading comprehension, and 12% in nonword reading. When entered last (i.e., in sixth order of entry), the visualorthographic task accounted for significant independent variance in each reading measure, and for more variance in reading comprehension than phonological awareness or naming speed. In sixth order of entry, both phonological awareness and naming speed also accounted for significant independent variance in each reading measure, with phonological awareness accounting for more variance in nonword reading. The hierarchical regression analyses are shown in table III. BETWEEN-GROUP ANALYSES There were 60 children (29%) with a visual-orthographic deficit and 147 with no visual-orthographic (NVO) deficit. The performance of the VO and NVO groups on the study variables was compared using ANOVA with the alpha level set at .05. The groups differed in age (VO group older) and in phonological awareness (VO group lower), in addition to the groupdefining measure, but did not differ in IQ, naming speed, or verbal short-term memory. The VO group was significantly lower on all reading variables. When ANCOVA was performed on the reading variables, with age and phonological awareness as covariates, the VO group was still significantly lower: word reading, F(1,203) = 16.65, ?? .0000; reading comprehension, F(1,196) = 13.74, ?? .0003; nonword reading, F(1,203) = 10.42, p .0012. Group means and ANOVA results are shown in table IV. Effect sizes for reading were .77 word reading; .69 nonword reading; .74 reading comprehension. Speed reading index
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