Avaliação da habilidade de compreensão de leitura em alunos do ensino médio e universitário : dificuldades e funções cognitivas associadas

Abstract

This study investigated the cognitive mechanisms underlying reading comprehension in high school and college students through two studies using an experimental reading comprehension task. The first study involved 153 students (82 high school and 71 college students), aged 15 to 53 years, whose performance was assessed on measures of executive functions, processing speed, intelligence, verbal fluency, decoding, and reading comprehension. The experimental task consisted of retelling a narrative text, completing a questionnaire, and reading the text orally. The results indicated that, in general, college students performed better when compared to high school students. In addition, regression analyses demonstrated that reading comprehension is significantly associated with executive functions, in addition to vocabulary and decoding. The second study analyzed the performance of two students, one diagnosed with dyslexia and the other with dyslexia and dyscalculia, comparing them to a matched control group from Study 1. The results showed that the students performed worse than the control group and suggested an additive pattern of impairment in the student with a comorbidity profile. In short, the studies showed that variables such as decoding, vocabulary, and executive functions are important predictors of reading comprehension performance. Furthermore, it was concluded that the experimental task developed proved to be an effective tool for assessing reading comprehension in populations with higher levels of education, allowing the identification of specific patterns of difficulty. The research contributes to filling important gaps in the scientific field by pointing out factors that impact reading comprehension.