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Procrastination could be conceptualized as a self-regulation failure. However, it is still not clear what type of self-regulation processes are precisely underlying the students' tendency to procrastinate. The main objective of our study was therefore to predict variations in academic procrastination by considering two constructs related to self-regulation: motivational factors (i.e., achievement goals), and learning strategies: deep learning cognitive strategies--Elaboration and Critical thinking--, effort regulation management. The results of an online study on 249 first-year humanities and social sciences French students showed that 30% of the variance in procrastination was predicted positively by avoidance goals and negatively by effort regulation management. The effort regulation management strategy alone contributed to 24% of the variance in procrastination. Furthermore, the results confirmed the negative relationship between academic performance and procrastination tendency. Added together, these results support the conceptualization of procrastination as a self-regulation failure and specially of learning such as effort regulation management. Results are discussed in relation to possible interventions that aim to reduce procrastination in order to promote academic success and students' well-being.

With the development of the Internet as a main source of information, teenagers are increasingly faced with multiple documents which may contain contradictory statements, and whose reliability must be assessed. One way to assess information reliability is to evaluate the source of the information (e.g., author expertise, intention). However, teenagers rarely engage in such a sourcing process. The present study aims to explore the role of a potential explanatory factor of teenagers' sourcing abilities: Advanced Theory of Mind (AToM). We hypothesized that AToM would be significantly related to teenagers' evaluation skills when reading multiple documents, and in particular to their attribution of sources' intentions and benevolence. We also hypothesized that this contribution will occur over and above teenagers' word reading and textual inferencing skills. Seventy-two students in Grade 8 read a set of online documents about a fictitious socio-scientific controversy and answered comprehension and evaluation questions. AToM was a significant predictor of comprehension and evaluation performance. The role of AToM was especially important for the source's evaluation and intentions questions. This study thus contributes to a better understanding of the possible factors of teenagers' developing sourcing skills.

Background: Drawing on theories of purposeful reading, this study explored task conditions that support fifth graders' selective reading of documents in order to answer questions. More specifically, we investigated whether promoting students' elaboration of their task model increases task performance. Methods: Participants had to answer series of questions by searching documents for the relevant information. Half the participants received a task model prompt, and half received a control prompt. Participants' eye movements were recorded during text search, in order to investigate more precisely the effect of an enhanced task model. Results: Participants provided more correct answers in the task model condition than in the control condition, but there was no difference in response time. Unexpectedly, eye movement analysis did not reveal any differences between conditions concerning the number of visits and visit time to relevant and irrelevant areas of the document. Conclusions: A better representation of the information to be searched facilitated students' identification of relevant information. Unexpectedly, however, the task conditions did not result in any significant difference in students' patterns of document search.

Many studies have demonstrated the crucial role of vocabulary in predicting reading performance in general. More recent work has indicated that one particular facet of vocabulary (its depth) is more closely related to language comprehension, especially inferential comprehension. On this basis, we developed a training application to specifically improve vocabulary depth. The objective of this study was to test the effectiveness of a mobile application designed to improve vocabulary depth. The effectiveness of this training was examined on 3rd and 4th grade children's vocabulary (breadth and depth), decoding and comprehension performances. A "randomized waiting-list control" paradigm was used in which an experimental group first received the intervention during the first 4 weeks (between pretest and post-test1), thereafter, a waiting control group received the training for the next 4 weeks (between postest1 and posttest2). Results showed that the developed application led to significant improvements in terms of vocabulary depth performance, as well as a significant transfer effect to reading comprehension. However, we did not observe such a beneficial effect on either vocabulary breadth or written word identification. These results are discussed in terms of the links between vocabulary depth and comprehension, and the opportunities the app presents for remedying language comprehension deficits in children.

The authors examined adolescents' detection of features that affect the quality of web information. In experiment 1, participants (12-16 years old) rated the goodness/usefulness of four web-like documents for a simulated study assignment. Each document came with an issue that potentially undermined its quality. Two documents had source-related issues (i.e., noncompetent author, outdated), and the other two documents had content-related issues (i.e., topic mismatch, poor readability). Most students failed to notice the issues, including topic mismatch. The participants also produced inconsistent evaluations of topic match, readability, author competence, and currency. In experiment 2, students were prompted to assess each criterion separately. The participants distinguished poorer from better documents in relation to each criterion, except for author competence. The authors discuss these results in light of previous research on adolescents' evaluation behavior, propose further avenues for reading research, and articulate recommendations for educational practice.

Purpose: We investigated the relationships between text reading comprehension and oral idiom comprehension in adolescents. We also examined the more specific relationships between inference in text comprehension and inference in idiom comprehension. Method: We selected participants from an initial sample of 140 students aged 13-15 years to form 2 groups, according to their decoding and reading comprehension abilities: 1 group of good comprehenders/good decoders (n = 49) and 1 group of less skilled comprehenders but with adequate decoding skills (n = 20). The reading comprehension task comprised both literal and inferential (text-based and knowledge-based) questions. These 2 groups were then compared on an idiom comprehension task. In this task, idioms were presented orally, and students were placed in a situation that simulated a real-life oral interaction. The idioms were novel for the students (translated from a foreign language), either transparent or opaque, and presented either with a supportive context or without any context. Results: Good reading comprehenders outperformed less skilled ones on the idiom task. Both groups benefited from the supportive context, especially the good comprehenders. Knowledge-based inferences in written text comprehension were related to contextual inferences for opaque idioms, while semantic inferences for transparent idioms were related to literal text comprehension, but not to text-connecting inferences. Conclusion: These results are discussed both theoretically, in terms of cross-modal comprehension processes, and practically, in terms of implications for remediation., Comprehension skills are usually described as 'general' abilities that are not specific to any particular modality of language presentation (e.g., written, oral, or picture form). As a result, readers exhibiting [...]

The aim of this study was to investigate the early characteristics of four profiles of readers established in second grade (7-8 years of age): good readers, specific poor decoders, specific poor comprehenders and general poor readers. These profiles were compared retrospectively on a range of measures administered 2 years earlier, in kindergarten. These measures were based on factors known to be predictors of either decoding skills or comprehension performance. The results showed that children experiencing comprehension difficulties in second grade have early deficits in vocabulary, inferencing, working memory and morphology, while the children with decoding difficulties have limited letter knowledge and rapid naming performance. Phonological skills and verbal short-term memory appeared to be deficient in all three profiles of struggling readers. These results are discussed in terms of the early identification of at-risk children in kindergarten and the remedial programmes that could be provided to them at an early stage.

This article presents two studies investigating the role of executive functioning in written text comprehension in children and adolescents. In a first study, the involvement of executive functions in reading comprehension performance was examined in normally developing children in fifth grade. Two aspects of text comprehension were differentiated: literal and inferential processes. The results demonstrated that while three aspects of executive functioning (working memory, planning, and inhibition processes) were significantly predictive of the performance on the inferential questions of the comprehension test, these factors did not predict the scores on the literal tasks of the test. In a second experiment, the linguistic and cognitive profiles of children in third/fifth and seventh/ninth grades with a specific reading comprehension deficit were examined. This analysis revealed that the deficits experienced by the less skilled comprehenders in both the linguistic and the executive domains could evolve over time. As a result, linguistic factors do not make it possible to distinguish between good and poor comprehenders among the group of older children, whereas the difficulties relating to executive processing remain stable over development. These findings are discussed in the context of the need to take account of the executive difficulties that characterize less skilled comprehenders of any age, especially for remediation purposes.

This study examines children's strategies when scanning a document to answer a specific question. More specifically, we wanted to know whether they make use of organizers (i.e., headings) when searching and whether strategic search is related to their knowledge of reading strategies. Twenty-six French fifth graders were asked to search single-page documents presented on the screen of an eye tracker in order to respond to questions requiring the location of information in either a single paragraph (Location questions) or multiple paragraphs (Comparison questions). Location questions were easier and faster to answer than Comparison questions. The presence of headers led to more selective reading strategies but did not significantly speed up the search. Strong individual differences were observed in children's scanning strategies: Some systematically fixated headers, whereas others did not. These differences were not significantly related to the participants' decoding or comprehension skills but rather to their knowledge of reading strategies.

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that sentence processing is an essential mediatory skill between word recognition and text comprehension in reading. In Experiment 1, a semantic similarity judgement task was used with children from Grade 2 to Grade 9. They had to say whether two written sentences had the same (or very similar) meanings or whether the meanings of the two sentences were very different. As expected, performance improved with age both on the high-frequency words and with increasingly complex sentences. In Experiment 2 with children in Grade 3, scores in written sentence comprehension and vocabulary made the most important unique contribution to the reading comprehension of an expository text. The results are discussed first, in the light of a general framework in which sentence-level skill is at the core of reading comprehension and second, with reference to the issue of reading assessment. (Contains 2 tables, 3 figures, and 3 notes.)

This study examines the effects of a new CAI program designed to remediate text comprehension difficulties in less skilled comprehenders at the beginning of learning to read. In a randomized control trial design, two groups of second grade children experiencing comprehension difficulties were selected and trained using two CAI programs. One of these was designed to assist comprehension processes (experimental group) whereas the other encouraged word decoding (control group). Four tasks were administered using a classical pre-test/training/post-test design: listening comprehension, reading comprehension, vocabulary and comprehension monitoring. In addition, two post-test sessions were conducted: one just after the training and one 11 months later. The experimental group exhibited a greater level of progress in both listening and reading comprehension, with notable lasting effects. In contrast, the results relating to the vocabulary and comprehension monitoring tasks were more mixed. The results are discussed in the light of the possible use of CAI when training higher-level skills such as text comprehension. (Contains 3 figures and 1 table.)

This study was designed to examine whether a variety of cognitive and linguistic factors theoretically considered to be predictive of reading comprehension skills in elementary school children were also predictive of listening comprehension skills in 131 five-year-old children. The results showed that the predictors of young children's listening comprehension performance are indeed similar to those identified in the literature as predictive of reading comprehension performance. The involvement of sentence comprehension skills, updating capacities, vocabulary, and syntactic and morphological knowledge was therefore confirmed in young children. Furthermore, a cluster analysis provided evidence of early profiles of comprehenders who differed in their ability to respond to either literal or inferential questions in a comprehension test. The skills that make it possible to distinguish between these profiles are identified. (Contains 6 tables.)

This study examines the development of source evaluation skills in four groups of students from 10 to 19 years of age. We designed a set of tasks based on a distinction between three components of source evaluation: the identification of source parameters; the evaluation of source features such as the source's competence or benevolence under explicit instructions; and the use of source features in assessing a document's relevance with respect to a given task. This inventory was administered to 245 teenagers in grades 5, 7 and 9 and to undergraduate students. All types of source evaluation skills developed throughout adolescence, with some of them remaining suboptimal for older readers. Furthermore, we found weak relationships between students' identification of source parameters and their use of source features in the absence of any specific prompt. Finally, source evaluation tasks were weakly related to teenagers' word reading skills. Taken together, these results document teenagers' acquisition of source evaluation skills and warrant a distinction between readers' ability to comprehend source features and to use these features when assessing information quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to investigate the early characteristics of four profiles of readers established in second grade (7-8 years of age): good readers, specific poor decoders, specific poor comprehenders and general poor readers. These profiles were compared retrospectively on a range of measures administered 2 years earlier, in kindergarten. These measures were based on factors known to be predictors of either decoding skills or comprehension performance. The results showed that children experiencing comprehension difficulties in second grade have early deficits in vocabulary, inferencing, working memory and morphology, while the children with decoding difficulties have limited letter knowledge and rapid naming performance. Phonological skills and verbal short-term memory appeared to be deficient in all three profiles of struggling readers. These results are discussed in terms of the early identification of at-risk children in kindergarten and the remedial programmes that could be provided to them at an early stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents two studies investigating the role of executive functioning in written text comprehension in children and adolescents. In a first study, the involvement of executive functions in reading comprehension performance was examined in normally developing children in fifth grade. Two aspects of text comprehension were differentiated: literal and inferential processes. The results demonstrated that while three aspects of executive functioning (working memory, planning, and inhibition processes) were significantly predictive of the performance on the inferential questions of the comprehension test, these factors did not predict the scores on the literal tasks of the test. In a second experiment, the linguistic and cognitive profiles of children in third/fifth and seventh/ninth grades with a specific reading comprehension deficit were examined. This analysis revealed that the deficits experienced by the less skilled comprehenders in both the linguistic and the executive domains could evolve over time. As a result, linguistic factors do not make it possible to distinguish between good and poor comprehenders among the group of older children, whereas the difficulties relating to executive processing remain stable over development. These findings are discussed in the context of the need to take account of the executive difficulties that characterize less skilled comprehenders of any age, especially for remediation purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]