Reading for Understanding: Research on Reading Comprehension in Higher Education

This study examines the impact of text structure training on reading comprehension in college students. The ability of a person to comprehend and derive meaning from the text is the main goal of reading. Participants recruited were undergraduate psychology students at a university in the Upper Midwest, who were randomly assigned to complete a tutorial on text structures or to participate in a control condition. The assessment given to each participant was a novel passage which followed the problem-solution text structure. All participants responded to a detailed survey and assessment. It was hypothesized that the participants who went through the text structure training prior to taking the assessment would be able to answer the comprehension questions correctly and identify more main ideas than those who did not receive any training