Some College Students Read Without Understanding, Finds Study

Research finds about 5 percent of college students with comprehension difficulties. (Photos.com)

College students who can read fluently do not necessarily comprehend the text and could also have memory problems, according to a study at Canada’s University of Alberta.

Testing about 400 students at the university, researchers found “a significant number of university students with undetected comprehension deficits (about 5 percent of the population),” Dr. George Georgiou told The Epoch Times via email. “If only reading accuracy measures are used to identify possible reading difficulties, then these students will not be picked up.”

Georgiou and fellow researcher Dr. J. P. Das further examined students who could read fluently but had comprehension difficulties, and found that they also had problems with working memory.

Working memory is the ability to store information temporarily for further processing. Doing math by heart, for example, requires working memory.

“The students invest most of their time on reading and they forget the meaning. They read and they decode the whole passage,” Georgiou explained in a press release. “So, by the time they get to the end, they forget what the first paragraph was talking about.”

“From a theoretical point of view, the deficits observed in working memory can be attributed to lower-level deficits in successive processing, that is, retaining and executing a series of instructions in the right order,” Georgiou told The Epoch Times. “In order to improve their learning, these students need specific reading comprehension strategies.”

According to Georgiou, it would be helpful for these students to write down the main idea of each paragraph while reading, and practice by reading texts from a wide range of subjects.

“We could argue that allowing students to read beyond their homework would let them gain a more comprehensive knowledge of the world,” he said of improving high school education to prepare students for college.

The findings will be presented at the Text and Discourse Conference in Montreal this coming summer.