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A longitudinal study of deaf students’ use of an associational strategy on a reading comprehension test
Author(s) -
Wolk Steve,
Schildroth Arthur
Publication year - 1985
Publication title -
journal of research in reading
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.077
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1467-9817
pISSN - 0141-0423
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9817.1985.tb00309.x
Subject(s) - psychology , paragraph , reading comprehension , test (biology) , sentence , sentence completion tests , comprehension , selection (genetic algorithm) , association (psychology) , cognitive psychology , reading (process) , developmental psychology , linguistics , paleontology , philosophy , artificial intelligence , world wide web , computer science , biology , psychotherapist
The present investigation focused upon the use of a choice‐dependent associational strategy by hearing‐impaired students during a test of reading comprehension. An analysis of selected test items from the Stanford Achievement Test indicated that hearing‐impaired students significantly favoured answers based upon association cues unrelated to the overall meaning of the preceding paragraph or stimulus sentence. The use of this strategy was highly stable over time; nearly seven of every ten students who used the strategy during an initial test administration reused the strategy a year later. Significant numbers of students also shifted away, after the year's interval, from the selection of correct answers or other incorrect distractor choices to the selection of the association‐based answers. Finally, those students with the most profound hearing losses were even more likely to use and reuse the strategy, suggesting that hearing‐impaired students are limited in those reading skills required for inferential processing and thus rely upon more concrete and comprehensible semantic cues.