Differentiation and achievement grouping are frequently implemented practices to adapt education to students’ varying educational needs based on achievement level. Potential didactical and... Show moreDifferentiation and achievement grouping are frequently implemented practices to adapt education to students’ varying educational needs based on achievement level. Potential didactical and socioemotional advantages and disadvantages of these practices have been discussed in the literature. However, little is known about the perspective of students themselves. This study examined how students (N = 428) perceived differentiation and within-class homogeneous achievement grouping in primary mathematics education, with attention for potential differences between students of diverse achievement levels. Students of Grades 1, 3 and 5 completed a questionnaire about various differentiated mathematics activities and (if applicable) within-class achievement grouping. In line with the didactical perspective on differentiation, extended instruction and less difficult tasks were appreciated most by low-achieving students whereas more difficult tasks were appreciated most by high-achieving students. Students of all achievement groups had largely positive attitudes about achievement grouping and about their own achievement group. However, some differences between achievement groups were found, with less favourable results for students placed in low achievement groups. Students’ responses to open-ended questions provided additional insights into the reasons behind students’ evaluations of differentiation and achievement grouping. Differences between grade levels were also explored. Show less
In two reading experiments, we examined the efficacy of the commercial reading assistance application BeeLine Reader which colours the letters of digital texts in gradients. According to its... Show moreIn two reading experiments, we examined the efficacy of the commercial reading assistance application BeeLine Reader which colours the letters of digital texts in gradients. According to its developers, BeeLine Reader increases reading speed, improves comprehension, and makes reading more enjoyable. We tested these hypotheses for second- and third-grade pupils (6–9 years old), assessing the influence of BeeLine Reader in several layouts in which we varied other features that are known to impact the reading processes of beginning readers (line spacing, line length, text segmentation). In comparison to control texts with a standard black font, reading time advantages for BeeLine texts emerged for pupils in second grade (not in third grade) when they read texts with long lines and little inter-line spacing. However, when second-grade readers processed texts that were optimized for their reading level (texts with short lines and sufficient inter-line spacing) they displayed a slower reading pace in texts with a BeeLine font than in texts with a black font. Furthermore, BeeLine texts may hamper comprehension for third-grade readers and were rated as more difficult and less convenient to process than texts with a black font. In conclusion, the visual anchors offered by BeeLine Reader may be useful for some beginning readers in some situations but the application can also impede the readability of texts. These findings emphasize that claims made for digital reading applications should be formally tested if they are going to be introduced into educational settings. Show less
Karlsson, A.K.J.; Broek, P.W. van den; Helder, A.; Hickendorff, M.; Koornneef, A.W.; Leijenhorst, L. van 2018
This study aimed to identify reading behavior profiles in nine-to-eleven year old children based on their think-aloud responses while reading narrative and expository texts. Three profiles emerged... Show moreThis study aimed to identify reading behavior profiles in nine-to-eleven year old children based on their think-aloud responses while reading narrative and expository texts. Three profiles emerged while reading narratives: Literal Readers, who stay close to the literal text by predominantly repeating it; Paraphrasing Readers, who extract meaning from the text by paraphrasing it; and Elaborating Readers, who use background knowledge to explain the text by generating inferences. The three profiles also emerged while reading expository text. Children generally exhibited the same profiles across the two text genres, however, expository texts elicited fewer correct inferences but more invalid inferences than did narratives, suggesting that children are influenced by text demands. Elaborating Readers had better word decoding skills, reading comprehension ability, and non-verbal reasoning ability than readers of the two other profiles, indicating a positive relation between inference generation and language abilities and cognitive resources. Show less
Kraal, A.; Koornneef, A.W.; Saab, N.; Broek, P.W. van den 2017
Eye-trackers are a popular tool for studying cognitive, emotional, and attentional processes in different populations (e.g., clinical and typically developing) and participants of all ages, ranging... Show moreEye-trackers are a popular tool for studying cognitive, emotional, and attentional processes in different populations (e.g., clinical and typically developing) and participants of all ages, ranging from infants to the elderly. This broad range of processes and populations implies that there are many inter- and intra-individual differences that need to be taken into account when analyzing eye-tracking data. Standard parsing algorithms supplied by the eye-tracker manufacturers are typically optimized for adults and do not account for these individual differences. This paper presents gazepath, an easy-to-use R-package that comes with a graphical user interface (GUI) implemented in Shiny (RStudio Inc 2015). The gazepath R-package combines solutions from the adult and infant literature to provide an eye-tracking parsing method that accounts for individual differences and differences in data quality. We illustrate the usefulness of gazepath with three examples of different data sets. The first example shows how gazepath performs on free-viewing data of infants and adults, compared to standard EyeLink parsing. We show that gazepath controls for spurious correlations between fixation durations and data quality in infant data. The second example shows that gazepath performs well in high-quality reading data of adults. The third and last example shows that gazepath can also be used on noisy infant data collected with a Tobii eye-tracker and low (60 Hz) sampling rate. Show less
In an eye-tracking experiment we examined the risky reading hypothesis, in which long saccades and many regressions are considered to be indicative of a proactive reading style (Rayner et al. in... Show moreIn an eye-tracking experiment we examined the risky reading hypothesis, in which long saccades and many regressions are considered to be indicative of a proactive reading style (Rayner et al. in Psychol Aging 21(3):448, 2006; Psychol Aging 24(3):755, 2009). We did so by presenting short texts—that confirmed or disconfirmed verb-based implicit causality expectations—to two types of readers: proactive readers (long saccades, many regressions) and conservative readers (short saccades, few regressions). Whereas proactive readers used implicit causality information to predict upcoming referents, and slowed down immediately when they encountered a pronoun that was inconsistent with these verb-based expectations, the conservative readers slowed down much later in the sentence. These findings were consistent with the predictions of the risky reading hypothesis and as such presented novel evidence for the general idea that the eye-movement profile of readers reveals valuable information about their processing strategy. Show less
Koornneef, A.W.; Dotlacil, J.; Broek, P.W. van den; Sanders, T.J. 2016
