High-achieving ninth grade students’ self-reported strategy use and its relation to strategic reading behavior

Abstract

AbstractStrategies in reading are viewed as essential tools needed to increase comprehension and learning from text. Especially in large-scale assessments, reliable and economic measures of reading strategies are needed which are valid to assess the strategy-performance relation. Questionnaire-based self-report measures are very popular but often fail to establish a positive relation between strategy use and performance. Nevertheless, these measures are objective and content valid as well as efficient in use. One explanation for this fact may be that, depending on students’ individual approaches to reading, various strategies may lead to better performance. Then, self-report questionnaires of strategy use (SRQs) would assess differences in strategic approaches of students which are not (necessarily) linked to performance. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether students’ differences in self-reported strategy use correspond to different strategic approaches in reading. The present study compares strategic reading behavior of a homogeneous sample of 22 high-achieving ninth grade students with superior performance in reading who were chosen for their high reading-related strategy knowledge and their difference in self-reported strategy use, assessed via questionnaire. Eleven students reported frequent strategy use (FSU) and 11 students reported seldom strategy use (SSU). For both groups, strategic reading behavior was assessed in an unobtrusive way using a computer-based multiple-choice reading test. Even though both groups showed little to none differences in reading performance, results indicate that FSU and SSU students differ in processing of text during initial reading and while re-reading text passages. In addition, they differed in how they proceed with reading tasks.