What degree of disruption to students' reading comprehension occurs when spacing is removed from text?
Hyegyeong Sim, Youngmin Park · Korean Association For Learner-Centered Curriculum And Instruction · 2023
Objectives The purpose of this study was to investigate the degree to which students' reading comprehension is disrupted when spacing is removed from text. Methods To this end, 200 high school students were perform an inferential reading comprehension in which texts with different spacing were evenly distributed. Based on the performance of the reading task, the degree to which students' reading comprehension is disrupted when spacing is removed from text was analyzed through effect size. Results First, the average score of reading comprehension in the text with maintained spacing (hereafter Condition 1) was higher than that of the text with removed spacing (hereafter Condition 2). Second, the average score of reading comprehension in Condition 1 was higher than that in Condition 2 for both explanatory and narrative texts, but the difference was greater in the explanatory text. Third, the difference between high-level and low-level students was significant in both Condition 1 and Condition 2, and the average score of reading comprehension in Condition 1 was higher than that in Condition 2 for both high-level and low-level students. Fourth, the average score of reading comprehension for female students was higher than that for male students in both Condition 1 and Condition 2. Conclusions Considering this, the impact of cognitive interference factors such as spacing differs depending on the type of text. Therefore, it is necessary to explore instructional approaches that can compensate for the gap in reading comprehension caused by differences in difficulty and preference depending on the type of text.