Textual material treated with embedded aids produced 10-15% higher reading comprehension scores than conventional text, statistically significant at the .01 level, in a science-material study with approximately 200 tenth graders across three schools.¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r2 · q2 · i2 medium
Currency · newest study 1977 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person
Evidence quality · No study behind this claim is a peer-reviewed article with a DOI: it rests on an ERIC document (a report, conference paper or thesis). It is kept because 2 design pages cite it; treat it as a lead to check, not an established finding.

Subclaims¶

q2 i2 Experimental group students in all three schools scored 10-15% higher in reading comprehension, a difference statistically significant at the .01 level by a t-test between the means. → Manzo 1977

Evidence¶

Manzo 1977¶

Manzo, Anthony V. (1977). 'Imbedded Aids' to Readers: Alternatives to Traditional Textual Material. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED136196

q2 · i2 · causal · r2

Quasi-experimental study of science material with approximately 200 tenth graders across three schools comparing aided and conventional text. The article reports "10-15% higher in reading comprehension" and significance "at the .01 level of confidence by a t-test between the means."

"Experimental group students in all three schools scored 10-15% higher in reading comprehension. This difference was found to be statistically significant at the .01 level of confidence by a t-test between the means."

Discussion¶

Learner Variables¶

• Academic and Critical Literacy — outcome: instruction changes it

Related Claims¶

• Vocabulary Instruction Improves Comprehension — the general claim this finding bears on, with the studies behind it
• Students and teachers respond favorably to embedded aids: approximately 90% of students reported no difficulty understanding or using the aids, and over 75% wanted similar aids throughout the book. — related
• Using embedded aids required students to take about 7% longer, on average, to complete an assigned chapter, and comprehension scores reflected this additional effort. — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Embedded aids address the content-area reading problem by helping weak readers read textual material and helping effective readers transfer training across disciplines, via a running commentary explaining key concepts, terminology, and questions. — related
• Students do not appear to have great difficulty adjusting to a more 'busy' page when assistance and enrichment units are woven into textual material. — related
• Verbal-protocol-guided revisions of functional documents improved comprehension, with error rates falling from 50% to 22% despite longer texts — related
• Co-constructing visual-textual representations without timeline integration did not significantly raise post-test scores over textual representations — related
• Learners hold positive attitudes toward glosses, but their perceptions of which gloss type works best do not match measured performance — related
• The revised coherence version measurably increased textual coherence on two quantitative indices — related