October 17, 2025 – 1:00 p.m. On-site and online session (Room M204, Faculty of Psychology and Speech Therapy). Language: English.

A characteristic of good reading skills is the ability to make efficient use of appropriate self-regulated reading processes to successfully comprehend the text at hand. Many high school students struggle to read complex digital documents where the task demands require the use of different reading processes.  In this study, we designed a long-term intervention study which 700 high school students were tasked to read one digital text per week and then respond to adjunct reading comprehension tasks. The students were given immediate feedback on their task performance (corrective), or about what strategy or process the student should use to answer the reading task correctly (elaborative). Task difficulty increased over the course of the intervention. Successful performance on reading comprehension tasks can be interpreted as the product of two things – The task difficulty (i.e., probability of answering a task correctly) and the person’s reading skills.

Using linear mixed-effects modelling, we examined whether elaborative feedback positively predicts reading comprehension. Second, we examined potential moderators which was associated with changes in successful task performance in the elaborative feedback condition over time. We tested if changes in reading comprehension over time was moderated by differences in student’s reading skills and task difficulty. Results reveal that elaborative feedback positively predicts reading comprehension among 7^th and 8^th graders. Surprisingly, elaborative feedback negatively predicted reading comprehension among 9^th and 10^th grade students. For the second research question, we found that successful task performance in the elaborative feedback condition declines over time in both grade groups, but this change is moderated by students’ reading skills and task difficulty. Our results indicate that elaborative feedback may foster reading comprehension skills in younger high school students, but that the benefit may diminish in older age group. The benefit from elaborative feedback is also attenuated by between-person differences in reading skills.

Bio

Oscar Skovdahl is a PhD candidate at the Department of Special Needs Education at the University of Oslo. His expertise lies in statistics and educational assessments. His educational background is in educational measurement and psychology, and he has previously worked as a statistical advisor for the Directorate of Education and Training in Norway. His research interests include digital reading, educational and cognitive psychology (especially reading comprehension and reading difficulties, as well as methodology, psychometrics and statistical modelling).