The Impact of Science Knowledge, Reading Skill, and Reading Strategy Knowledge on More Traditional “High-Stakes” Measures of High School Students’ Science Achievement

By Tenaha O'Reilly, Danielle S. McNamara. 2007

275 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study examined how well cognitive abilities predict high school students’ science achievement as measured by traditional content-based tests. Students (n = 1,651) from four high schools in three states were assessed on their science knowledge, reading skill, and reading strategy knowledge. The dependent variable, content-based science achievement, was measured in terms of students’ comprehension of a science passage, science course grade, and state science test scores. The cognitive variables reliably predicted all three measures of science achievement, and there were also significant gender differences. Reading skill helped the learner compensate for deficits in science knowledge for most measures of achievement and had a larger effect on achievement scores for higher knowledge than lower knowledge students. Implications for pedagogy and science assessment are discussed.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/63e4fc42910599dd0b52b1dc3a2918f7ad0a0de9

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Cohesion, coherence, and expert evaluations of writing proficiency (2010, unknown): “Keywords: Coherence; Writing Quality; Cohesion, Linguistics, Computational Algorithms, Models.”
Bridging Reading Comprehension and Conceptual Change in Science Education: The Promise of Refutation Text (2011, background): “Coherence breaks (Beck, McKeown, Sinatra, & Loxterman, 1991), unrealistic assumptions about readers’ background knowledge (McKeown et al., 1992; O’Reilly & McNamara, 2007), unfamiliar or highly technical vocabulary, high density of new concepts (Mikkilia-Erdmann, 2002), and a high inference demand…”
Improving Middle School Students’ Science Literacy Through Reading Infusion (2010, methodology): “We assessed the cluster effect by calculating the intraclass correlations, which is the ratio of the between-class variance and the total outcome variance ( Raudenbush & Bryk, 2002 ; Snijders & Bosker, 1999 ).”
Core academic language skills: An expanded operational construct and a novel instrument to chart school-relevant language proficiency in preadolescent and adolescent learners (2014, background): “For instance, the research conducted by Kintsch (2004), and also by O’Reilly and McNamara (2007), suggests that text features (i.e., level of cohesion) and readers’ characteristics (i.e., background knowledge and comprehension skills) interactively impact reading comprehension.”
Reading Achievement and Science Proficiency: International Comparisons From the Programme on International Student Assessment (2009, background): “O’Reilly and McNamara (2007) measured science proficiency, reading comprehension, background knowledge, and reading strategies with 694 high school students from two Virginia high schools.”
The Nature of the Refutation Text Effect: An Investigation of Attention Allocation (2010, methodology): “Such texts assume that the reader has sufficient prior knowledge to make the necessary inferences to comprehend the ideas in the text (O’Reilly & McNamara, 2007).”
Science Achievement Gaps Begin Very Early, Persist, and Are Largely Explained by Modifiable Factors (2016, background): “In contrast, O’Reilly and McNamara (2007) found that being a skilled reader helped compensate for a lower level of background knowledge about science among older children.”
Linguistic Features of Writing Quality (2010, background): “High-knowledge readers can gain from low-cohesion text that forces them to generate inferences while reading (e.g., McNamara, 2001); moreover, skilled readers who have sufficient knowledge about the domain are not affected by cohesion in the text (O’Reilly & McNamara, 2007).”
The Influence of Teachers’ Knowledge on Student Learning in Middle School Physical Science Classrooms (2013, background): “O’Reilly and McNamara (2007) found that reading skill helped high school students earn higher scores on tests of science knowledge with a larger effect on students starting with more science knowledge.”