Cognitive Processing Strategies in Reading

The present study examined the cognitive processing strategies of good and poor readers from two different grades and attempted to make an information processing analysis of reading. The performance of twenty good and twenty poor readers each from Grade 3 and Grade 5 was compared on tasks of attention, simultaneous and successive processing as well as planning. 2 (Grade) × 2 (Reading Status) analyses of variance revealed a significant effect of grade suggesting that the processes were developmentally sensitive. While the simultaneous and successive processing measures could differentiate the good readers from the poor ones, the former group showed their superiority in terms of attention and planning only when the task characteristic was complex. The results were interpreted within the theoretical framework of the PASS model suggesting cyclical hierarchical involvement of the two coding processes in reading