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How to Write a Thesis Statement
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Practice developing thesis statements with this writing introduction worksheet! Students will learn how to improve their writing with a strong, attention grabbing thesis statement. This activity helps build writing skills by asking students to create a statement for the topics provided, such as: “What was the greatest challenge in your life?”.

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- How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples
How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples
Published on January 11, 2019 by Shona McCombes . Revised on September 14, 2022 by Eoghan Ryan.
A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . It usually comes near the end of your introduction .
Your thesis will look a bit different depending on the type of essay you’re writing. But the thesis statement should always clearly state the main idea you want to get across. Everything else in your essay should relate back to this idea.
You can write your thesis statement by following four simple steps:
- Start with a question
- Write your initial answer
- Develop your answer
- Refine your thesis statement
Table of contents
What is a thesis statement, placement of the thesis statement, step 1: start with a question, step 2: write your initial answer, step 3: develop your answer, step 4: refine your thesis statement, types of thesis statements, frequently asked questions about thesis statements.
A thesis statement summarizes the central points of your essay. It is a signpost telling the reader what the essay will argue and why.
The best thesis statements are:
- Concise: A good thesis statement is short and sweet—don’t use more words than necessary. State your point clearly and directly in one or two sentences.
- Contentious: Your thesis shouldn’t be a simple statement of fact that everyone already knows. A good thesis statement is a claim that requires further evidence or analysis to back it up.
- Coherent: Everything mentioned in your thesis statement must be supported and explained in the rest of your paper.
The thesis statement generally appears at the end of your essay introduction or research paper introduction .
The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education. The use of the internet in academic contexts and among young people more generally is hotly debated. For many who did not grow up with this technology, its effects seem alarming and potentially harmful. This concern, while understandable, is misguided. The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its many benefits for education: the internet facilitates easier access to information, exposure to different perspectives, and a flexible learning environment for both students and teachers.
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You should come up with an initial thesis, sometimes called a working thesis , early in the writing process . As soon as you’ve decided on your essay topic , you need to work out what you want to say about it—a clear thesis will give your essay direction and structure.
You might already have a question in your assignment, but if not, try to come up with your own. What would you like to find out or decide about your topic?
For example, you might ask:
After some initial research, you can formulate a tentative answer to this question. At this stage it can be simple, and it should guide the research process and writing process .
Now you need to consider why this is your answer and how you will convince your reader to agree with you. As you read more about your topic and begin writing, your answer should get more detailed.
In your essay about the internet and education, the thesis states your position and sketches out the key arguments you’ll use to support it.
The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its many benefits for education because it facilitates easier access to information.
In your essay about braille, the thesis statement summarizes the key historical development that you’ll explain.
The invention of braille in the 19th century transformed the lives of blind people, allowing them to participate more actively in public life.
A strong thesis statement should tell the reader:
- Why you hold this position
- What they’ll learn from your essay
- The key points of your argument or narrative
The final thesis statement doesn’t just state your position, but summarizes your overall argument or the entire topic you’re going to explain. To strengthen a weak thesis statement, it can help to consider the broader context of your topic.
These examples are more specific and show that you’ll explore your topic in depth.
Your thesis statement should match the goals of your essay, which vary depending on the type of essay you’re writing:
- In an argumentative essay , your thesis statement should take a strong position. Your aim in the essay is to convince your reader of this thesis based on evidence and logical reasoning.
- In an expository essay , you’ll aim to explain the facts of a topic or process. Your thesis statement doesn’t have to include a strong opinion in this case, but it should clearly state the central point you want to make, and mention the key elements you’ll explain.
A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . Everything else you write should relate to this key idea.
The thesis statement is essential in any academic essay or research paper for two main reasons:
- It gives your writing direction and focus.
- It gives the reader a concise summary of your main point.
Without a clear thesis statement, an essay can end up rambling and unfocused, leaving your reader unsure of exactly what you want to say.
Follow these four steps to come up with a thesis statement :
- Ask a question about your topic .
- Write your initial answer.
- Develop your answer by including reasons.
- Refine your answer, adding more detail and nuance.
The thesis statement should be placed at the end of your essay introduction .
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McCombes, S. (2022, September 14). How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved May 28, 2023, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/thesis-statement/
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Course: LSAT > Unit 1
Getting started with reading comprehension.
- Catalog of question types | Reading comprehension
- Main point | Quick guide
- Recognition | Quick guide
- Clarifying meaning | Quick guide
- Purpose of reference | Quick guide
- Organizing information | Quick guide
- Inferences about views | Quick guide
- Inferences about information | Quick guide
- Inferences about attitudes | Quick guide
- Applying to new contexts | Quick guide
- Principles and analogies | Quick guide
- Additional evidence | Quick guide
- Primary purpose | Quick guide
Reading Comprehension overview
- Duration: 35 minutes
- Length: 26-28 passage-based questions (divided into four reading passages).
- Subject matter: Four passages are drawn from four areas: Law, Social Science, Science, and Humanities. Three of the passages will ask you questions about a single text. One of the passages, known sometimes as the “Comparative Reading set", will feature two texts, and the questions will focus on how they relate to each other.
- 1-2 passages: Total length of the text will be about 50-60 lines. The topics are diverse, and many may be unfamiliar to you.
- Questions: You’ll be asked several questions about the text. Some of the questions can be answered with information explicitly stated in the passage, but many questions ask about what can be inferred.
- Choices: You’ll be presented with five choices. Only one of them is correct. You’ll see us refer to the correct choice as the “answer” throughout your practice sessions.
What can I do to tackle the Reading Comprehension section most effectively?
- Why did the passage’s author include this quote? Was it supporting a claim?
- Why did the author include this example?
- What role does each claim, each paragraph play in the text’s overall argument?
All Reading Comprehension questions are not created equal!
Dos and don’ts.
- Don’t try to read faster: LSAT Reading Comprehension isn’t about speed and memorization. Students who consider themselves slower readers can be very successful on the test, by learning active reading strategies to identify the most important information. Some parts are okay to read less carefully, for example, because they contain details supporting a larger claim or point.
- Don’t add your own soundtrack: The LSAT doesn’t require any outside expertise in the many topics it presents to you. All of the information that you need will be presented in the passage. When you bring your own experience, knowledge and opinions about a topic into the mix, you may add your own unwarranted assumptions which will lead you to wrong choices. Strong critical readers avoid this common LSAT pitfall!
- Don’t time yourself too early on: Accuracy, then speed! When learning a new skill, it’s better to leave timing considerations to the side until you’ve increased your skill level enough to warrant timing. If you were learning piano, you wouldn’t play a piece at full-speed before you’d practiced the passages very slowly, and then less slowly, and then less slowly still.
- Do read with your pencil: Reading actively is helpful to understanding reading comprehension passages and not “zoning out” while you read. Many students like to underline or circle keywords, such as “however”, “therefore”, “argues that”, “first/second”, and many others that you’ll learn throughout your studies with us. If you’re reading with your pencil, you’re much less likely to wonder what you just read in the last minute, and you can focus on the structure and shifts in the action.
- Do be nimble: You don’t have to do the passages and questions in order, or even to do a given question at all. Many students find success maximizing their score by skipping a select handful of questions entirely, either because they know a question will take too long to solve, or because they just don’t know how to solve it.
- Do learn about all of the question types: An effective approach to a main point question is very different than an effective approach to an inference question, even though the passage is the same.
- Do spend time on the fundamentals: Effective reading strategies take time to learn and implement consistently. For example, understand how to identify important keywords (and why they’re important) before practicing many passages in a row. The hints and explanations in the system will help with this—a lot! Other key skills include characterizing the relationships between various points of view and identifying the purpose of a paragraph. Be patient with yourself!
- Do honor the precision of language: If the author writes, “This explanation isn’t well-supported, however”, an inference question might ask you what the author’s attitude towards the explanation is. A wrong choice would be something like, “vehement skepticism”, whereas the answer might be, “cautious doubt.” Many students are too approximate in their reading and it hurts their score on the LSAT; in other words, they see some degree of disagreement and they believe that any choice that expresses disagreement will be correct. They may see the word “most” in the passage and equate it to “all” by mistake.
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Close Reading a Text and Avoiding Pitfalls


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This handout covers major topics relating to writing about fiction. This covers prewriting, close reading, thesis development, drafting, and common pitfalls to avoid.
Also see the OWL handout on Writing about Literature and the OWL handout on Literary Terms .
Writing about a story or novel can be difficult because fiction is generally very complex and usually includes several points or themes. To discover these interwoven meanings, you must read the work closely. Below are three techniques for reading fiction actively and critically. Close reading takes more time than quick, superficial reading, but doing a close reading will save you from a lot of frustration and anxiety when you begin to develop your thesis.
Close Reading a Text
Use these "tracking" methods to yield a richer understanding of the text and lay a solid ground work for your thesis.
Pitfalls: Highlighting too much Highlighting without notes in the margins
These should be questions, comments, dialogue with the text itself.
A paragraph from Doris Lessing's short story "A Woman on a Roof" serves as an example:
The second paragraph could have a note from the reader like this:
Write quickly after your reading: ask questions, attempt answers and make comments about whatever catches your attention. A good question to begin with when writing response entries is "What point does the author seem to be making?"
After close reading and annotating, can you now make a statement about the story's meaning? Is the author commenting on a certain type of person or situation? What is that comment?
Avoiding Pitfalls
These four common assumptions about writing about fiction interfere with rather than help the writer. Learn to avoid them.
Assumes that the main task is simply recalling what happened in detail. Plot summary is just one of the requirements of writing about fiction, not the intended goal.
Assumes that writing about fiction is a "no win" game in which the student writer is forced to try to guess the RIGHT ANSWER that only the professor knows.
Assumes that ANY interpretation of any literary piece is purely whimsy or personal taste. It ignores the necessity of testing each part of an interpretation against the whole text, as well as the need to validate each idea by reference to specifics from the text or quotations and discussion from the text.
Assumes that writing the paper is only a way of stating the answer rather than an opportunity to explore an idea or explain what your own ideas are and why you have them. This sometimes leads to "padding," repeating the same idea in different words or worse, indiscriminate "expert" quoting: using too many quotes or quotes that are too long with little or no discussion.
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Brief research report article, the use of new technologies for improving reading comprehension.
- 1 Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Padua, Italy
- 2 Azienda Sociosanitaria Ligure 5 Spezzino, La Spezia, Italy
Since the introduction of writing systems, reading comprehension has always been a foundation for achievement in several areas within the educational system, as well as a prerequisite for successful participation in most areas of adult life. The increased availability of technologies and web-based resources can be a really valid support, both in the educational and clinical field, to devise training activities that can also be carried out remotely. There are studies in current literature that has examined the efficacy of internet-based programs for reading comprehension for children with reading comprehension difficulties but almost none considered distance rehabilitation programs. The present paper reports data concerning a distance program Cloze , developed in Italy, for improving language and reading comprehension. Twenty-eight children from 3rd to 6th grade with comprehension difficulties were involved. These children completed the distance program for 15–20 min for at least three times a week for about 4 months. The program was presented separately to each child, with a degree of difficulty adapted to his/her characteristics. Text reading comprehension (assessed distinguishing between narrative and informative texts) increased after intervention. These findings have clinical and educational implications as they suggest that it is possible to promote reading comprehension with a distance individualized program, avoiding the need for the child displacements, necessary for reaching a rehabilitation center.
Introduction
Reading comprehension is a fundamental cognitive ability for children, that supports school achievement and successively participation in most areas of adult life ( Hulme and Snowling, 2011 ). Therefore, children with learning disabilities (LD) and special educational needs who show difficulties in text comprehension, sometimes also in association with other problems, may have an increased risk of life and school failure ( Woolley, 2011 ). Reading comprehension is, indeed, a complex cognitive ability which involves not only linguistic (e.g., vocabulary, grammatical knowledge), but also cognitive (such as working memory, De Beni and Palladino, 2000 ), and metacognitive skills (both for the aspects of knowledge and control, Channa et al., 2015 ), and, more specifically, higher order comprehension skills such as the generation of inferences ( Oakhill et al., 2003 ).
Recently, due to the diffusion of technology in many fields of daily life, text comprehension at school, at home during homework, and at work is based on an increasing number of digital reading devices (computers and laptops, e-books, and tablet devices) that can become a fundamental support to improve traditional reading comprehension and learning skills (e.g., inference generation).
Some authors contrasted in children with typical development the effects of the technological interface on reading comprehension vs printed texts ( Kerr and Symons, 2006 ; Rideout et al., 2010 ; Mangen et al., 2013 ; Singer and Alexander, 2017 ; Delgado et al., 2018 ). Results were consistent and showed a worse comprehension performance in screen texts compared to printed texts for children ( Mangen et al., 2013 ; Delgado et al., 2018 ) and adolescents who nonetheless showed a preference for digital texts compared to printed texts ( Singer and Alexander, 2017 ). Regarding children with learning problems, only few studies considered the differences between printed texts and digital devices ( Chen, 2009 ; Gonzalez, 2014 ; Krieger, 2017 ) finding no significant differences, suggesting that the use of compensative digital tools for children with a learning difficulty could be a valid alternative with respect to the traditional written texts in facilitating their academic and work performance. This conclusion is also supported by the results of a meta-analysis ( Moran et al., 2008 ), regarding the use of digital tools and learning environments for enhancing literacy acquisition in middle school students, which demonstrates that technology can improve reading comprehension.
Different procedures and abilities are targeted in the international literature concerning computerized training programs for reading comprehension. In particular, various studies include activities promoting cognitive (e.g., vocabulary, inference making) and metacognitive (e.g., the use of strategies, comprehension monitoring, and identification of relevant parts in a text) components of reading comprehension. Table 1 reports the list of papers proposing computerized training programs with a summary of the findings encountered. Participants involved cover different ages and school grades, the majority belonging to middle school and high school. The general outcome of the studies is positive due to a significant improvement in comprehension skills after the training program with long-lasting effects also during follow-up; indeed, the majority of participants involved in training programs outperformed their peers assigned to comparison groups and maintained their improvements. Specifically, several studies ( O’Reilly et al., 2004 ; Magliano et al., 2005 ; McNamara et al., 2006 ) used the iSTART program with adolescents and young adults. This program promotes self-explanation, prior knowledge and reading strategies to enhance understanding of descriptive scientific texts. Results demonstrated that students who followed the iSTART program received more benefits than their peers, improving self-explanation and summarization. Additionally, strategic knowledge was a relevant factor for the outcome in comprehension tasks including multiple choice questions: students who already possessed good strategic knowledge improved their accuracy when answering to bridging inference questions, whereas students with low strategic knowledge became more accurate with text-based questions. Another program, ITSS, was used with younger students ( Meyer et al., 2011 ; Wijekumar et al., 2012 , 2013 , 2017 ), with the objective to support activities based on identifying main parts and key words in a text and classifying information in a hierarchical order. Positive outcomes were found also with such program since students who followed the ITSS program significantly improved text comprehension compared to their peers in the control group.

Table 1. Synthesis of the main results of the computerized training programs on comprehension present in the literature.
Although most of the literature deals with typical development, also cases of students with learning difficulties were considered. For example, Potocki et al. (2013) (see also Potocki et al., 2015 ) examined the effects of two different computerized programs with specific aims: one focusing on comprehension features, such as inference making and the analysis of text structure, the other considering decoding skills. Both training programs brought some benefits to reading comprehension, however larger effects were found with the program focused on comprehension with long-lasting effects in listening and reading comprehension (see also Kleinsz et al., 2017 ). Studies by Johnson-Glenberg (2005) and Kim et al. (2006) , using respectively the programs 3D Readers and CACSR, were able to promote reading comprehension abilities in middle school students through metacognitive activities. Thanks to these programs students also became more aware of reading strategies and implemented them more successfully during text comprehension. In particular, a study by Niedo et al. (2014) , obtained positive results on silent reading in a small group of children struggling with reading using the “cloze” procedure. This procedure proposes exercises in which parts of a text, typically words, are missing and participants are required to complete the text guessing what is missing.
Thus, computerized programs generally seem to improve reading comprehension skills. However, it should be noticed that, in most cases, students were trained at school, without the personalized support of a clinician taking into consideration the cognitive and psychological needs of the child. In particular, to our knowledge, no program examined the effects of an internet-based distance reading comprehension program which allows the child to be trained at home in a personalized way. A useful aspect of an internet-based distance training is that the psychologist can monitor with the application ( app ) the child’s results and activities and write him/her some motivational messages, reducing the attritions present in programs carried out at home with the only supervision of parents. Literature concerning distance trainings is still rare, however, some evidence suggests that these programs may represent a good integration to other types of intervention, usually carried out at school, in a rehabilitation center or at home (e.g., Mich et al., 2013 ).
Therefore, despite still preliminary, we think that it is relevant to present data about a distance program developed in Italy named Cloze ( Cornoldi and Bertolo, 2013 ), devised for rehabilitation purposes but with potential implication also for educational contexts. Cloze has been developed to promote inferential abilities both at a sentence- and discourse-level using the “cloze” procedure. Several findings in the literature demonstrate that abilities, such as anticipating text parts and inference making, bring improvements in text comprehension (e.g., Yuill and Oakhill, 1988 ) and it has been shown that one way to promote inferential competences is to improve the ability to predict parts of the text that are missing or that follow, considering the available information: the “cloze” technique appears to be one of the most successful ways for this purpose (e.g., Greene, 2001 ).
In the current study the effectiveness of this training program has been tested on a clinical population who exhibited, for various reasons, difficulties in reading comprehension. Participants were 28 children (16 male and 12 female) attending a private practice for learning difficulties in the city of La Spezia, in the north-west of Italy, from 3rd to 6th school grade (5 of 3rd, 9 of 4th, 11 of 5th and 3 of 6th grade), with a mean age of children of M = 9.79 years (SD = 1.03). Seventeen children had a current or past speech disorder: of these children 10 also had a LD (Learning Disabilities) and one was bilingual (speech problems were not due to bilingualism). The other 11 children had a LD or important learning difficulties, and one of them had also ADHD (Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder). For the goals of the study, all these children were considered together as they all presented a severe reading comprehension difficulty as reported by parents and teachers and confirmed by the initial assessment.
All children had received a comprehensive psychological assessment (see Table 2 ), adapted to their particular needs and ages. In particular all children had an IQ >80 assessed with the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-IV (WISC-IV; Wechsler, 2003 ) and did not have anxiety disorders, mood affective disorders or other developmental disorders, with the exception of the cases with language disorder and the case with ADHD. Children were not receiving any additional treatment, including medication. Written consent was obtained from the children’s parents in the context of the private practice.

Table 2. Main characteristics of the sample in terms of reading and cognitive abilities.
Materials and Methods
Pre-/post-test assessment and procedure of the training.
Each child started a training program through the distance rehabilitation platform Ridinet, using the Cloze app, after the assessment of learning and cognitive abilities, including comprehension assessment with two texts, one narrative and one informative ( Cornoldi and Carretti, 2016 ; Cornoldi et al., 2017 ). Connection to the Ridinet web site was required in order to access to the app, three or four times a week for more or less 15/20 min. The period of use was of 3 months for 6 children and 4 months for 22 children. After this period children’s comprehension was assessed again. Additionally, some questions were asked to parents and children about the app’s utility and pleasantness. In particular, children were asked: “Do you think the program helped you improve your text comprehension skills?,” “Did you like doing this program instead of the same exercises on paper?”; and parents were asked: “Was it difficult to start the Cloze activities on days when it had to be done?,” “Compared to the beginning of the treatment, how do you currently judge the ability of your child to understand the texts?”. For all questions, except the last one, the answer had to be given on a 5-point scale with 1 = not at all, 2 = a little, 3 = enough, 4 = very, 5 = very much. For the last question the answer changed on a 4-point scale with 1 = got worse, 2 = unchanged, 3 = slightly improved, and 4 = greatly improved.
Comprehension Tasks
Reading comprehension was assessed with two texts, the first narrative and the other informative, taken from Italian batteries for the assessment of reading ( Cornoldi and Carretti, 2016 ; Cornoldi et al., 2017 ). The texts range between 226 and 455 words in length, and their length increases with school grade (in order to have texts and questions matching the degrees of expertise at different grades the batteries include a different pair of texts for each grade). Students read the text in silence at their own pace, then answer a variable number of multiple-choice questions (depending on school grade), choosing one of four possible answers. There is no time limit, and students can reread the text whenever they wish. The final score is calculated as the total number of correct answers for each text. Alpha coefficients, as reported by the manuals, range between 0.61 and 0.83. For the purposes of the study we decided to use the same two comprehension texts, at pre-test and post-test, as the procedure offered the opportunity of directly examining and showing to parents changes in comprehension and previous evidence had shown the absence of relevant retest effects with this material in a retest carried out after 3 months ( Viola and Carretti, 2019 ).
Distance Rehabilitation Program: Cloze
Cloze ( Cornoldi and Bertolo, 2013 ) is an app for the promotion of text comprehension with the specific aim to recover processes of lexical and semantic inference. At each work session the child works with texts that lack words and must complete the empty spaces by choosing the correct alternative from those automatically proposed by the app, so that the text becomes congruent. The program is adaptive, as text complexity and proportion of missing words vary according to the previous level of response, and is designed for children who have weaknesses in written text comprehension, mainly due to poor skills in lexical and semantic inferential processes. The app also allows to enhance a set of language skills (phonology, syntax, semantics) which contribute to ensuring the fluidity of text and production processing. The recommended age range for the use of this program is between 7 and 14 years. In this study the semantic mode (only content words may be missing and no syntactic cues can be used for deciding between the alternatives) was proposed to 21 children and the syntactic mode (where all words may be missing) to 7 children. The mode type selected for each child depends from the performance at pre-test and diagnosis. A clinician, co-author of the present study (LB), monitored the child’s results and activities with the app and sent him/her from time to time some motivational messages. The motivational messages were typically sent once a week for congratulating with children for the work done and check with him/her possible problems emerged. Training lasted from 3 to 4 months and involved between 3 and 4 sessions of 15–20 min per week. The variation in duration depended on the decision of each individual family. In fact, children were required to use the software for about 4 months or in any case for a minimum period of 3 months (choice made by six families).
Effects on Reading Comprehension of Cloze Training
All analyses were carried out with SPSS 25 ( IBM Corp, 2017 ). A preliminary analysis found that all the examined variables met the assumptions of normality (K-S between 0.106 and 0.143, p > 0.05). Then, we compared the reading comprehension performance of children before and after the computerized training with Cloze . For this analysis, a repeated measure Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was conducted on comprehension scores to examine the differences in the whole group of children between the scores obtained before and after the training. A significant difference was found for both comprehension texts [ F (1,27) = 22.37, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.453 and F (1,27) = 38.90, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.599, respectively]. Possible differences between the two training modalities (semantic vs syntactic) and between different training periods (3 months vs 4 months) were then analyzed; no significant differences emerged between groups in both cases [ F (1,27) < 1].
Secondly, to analyze the role of individual differences at pre-test, the standardized training gain score (STG; Jaeggi et al., 2011 ) – computed by subtracting post-test score minus pre-test score, divided by the SD of the pre-test – was calculated for the two texts comprehension. Pearson correlations were computed between the STG and the variable collected at pre-test (reading speed and errors, WISC IV – Full scale IQ, Verbal Comprehension, Perceptual Reasoning, Working Memory and Processing Speed indexes). The only significant correlation was between STG of the narrative text and Verbal Comprehension Index of the WISC-IV Scale ( r = 0.38, p = 0.048). Finally, individual improvements from pre- to post-test were also confirmed considering changes in performance in terms of standard deviation in relations to norms (provided by the manual). Table 3 shows the number of children for each comprehension text who improved their performance moving from a performance at least 2 standard deviations or between 1 and 2 negative standard deviations under the mean to a performance above one negative standard deviation.

Table 3. Changes in performance in relations to norms (provided by the manual) after the training program Cloze.
Perceived Utility, Pleasantness, Parents and Child’s Improvements of Cloze
Results concerning the answers of parents and children about utility, pleasantness and self-perceived efficacy of the app, were also analyzed. At the first question, addressing children’s perceived improvement in comprehension skills, more than half of the sample chose the alternatives “very” or “very much” (15 “very” and 5 “very much”), only 1 child answered “a little” and the others chose “enough.” At the second question, about the pleasure of doing this kind of activity instead of pen and paper activities, all children answered “very” or “very much.” Concerning parents’ questions, at the first question about the difficulty to start the Cloze activity, only one parent answered “enough,” a quarter of the sample chose “a little” (seven families) and all the other 20 families chose the alternative “not at all.” At the last question about the perceived training efficacy on their child’s performance, the large majority of the families chose “slightly improved” or “greatly improved” and only three parents thought their children’s ability had remained unchanged. However, no correlations between parents and child’s perceived improvements and STG in reading comprehension were found.
The present study examined the effects of the use of Cloze , a distance rehabilitation program focused on inference skills, for improving reading comprehension, on the basis of the hypothesis that, being inference making related to reading comprehension at different ages (e.g., Oakhill and Cain, 2012 ), positive effects of the training activities on reading comprehension should be found.
Concerning the efficacy of computer-assisted training programs, literature highlights that many training programs are devised for an educational context. Results are generally encouraging with positive effects on reading comprehension, measured with materials different from those practiced during the training. However, few studies analyzed the efficacy in children with specific reading comprehension problems, and no studies considered the possibility of carrying out a training at home under the distance supervision of an expert. The latter characteristics are those that make the Cloze peculiar compared to the existent literature. Cloze is indeed based on a rehabilitation online platform which allows the child to complete personalized training activities several times a week, without moving from his/her home, and concurrently enabling the clinician to monitor the child’s progress or manage activities’ characteristics. The advantage of this procedure is twofold: on one hand it increases the potential number of training sessions per week, on the other hand it permits to save the necessary time to reach the center for rehabilitation and to reduce the costs of the intervention.
The preliminary data on Cloze were generally positive: children, working on either two slightly different versions of the same program, showed a generalized improvement in reading comprehension tasks and, together with their families, expressed appreciation for the pleasantness and the efficacy of the program. Encouraging results emerged also from the analysis of individual improvements referring to normative scores, as reported in Table 3 : most of the children’s performance migrated from a highly negative level to an average level.
It is noticeable that the efficacy of the training was assessed with materials different from those practiced during the training sessions, since reading comprehension tasks required to read a paper text and complete a series of multiple-choice questions. In future studies it would be interesting to analyze the effects of the program on skills known to be related to text comprehension, such as vocabulary or comprehension monitoring, for example. There is good reason to believe that since these variables are highly predictive of comprehension skills (and given that training in these skills sometimes improve comprehension; e.g., Beck et al., 1982 ; see also Hulme and Snowling, 2011 ), training that specifically targets comprehension might, in turn, lead to improvements in vocabulary or comprehension monitoring skills. Further studies are needed to explore this hypothesis.
A second relevant finding of the present study is the presence of a positive correlation between the gain obtained in one of the reading comprehension text (the narrative one) and the Verbal Comprehension Intelligence Quotient (VCIQ) index of the WISC-IV battery, showing that children who started with more resources in verbal intelligence achieved greater improvements in text comprehension at least with one type of text through the Cloze . The activities probably required to develop some kind of strategies, and for this reason students with larger verbal intellectual resources, who were presumably more able to develop new strategies, were more advantaged. Indeed, this amplification effect is usually found when training activities require the development of strategies ( von Bastian and Oberauer, 2014 ). Such result has clinical and educational implications, inviting professionals and teachers to consider children’s starting resources and, if necessary, to combine activities conducted through distance rehabilitation programs with personal intervention sessions that could teach strategies and promote a metacognitive approach to reading comprehension. However, some limitations of the present study must be acknowledged. Firstly, study did not include a control group, therefore findings should be taken with caution, although normative data and previous results obtained with the same test offer support to the robustness of our results and the use of normative data offers a control measure of how reading comprehension skills are acquired in typically developing children without specific training, therefore functioning as a sort of passive control group. Secondly, the treated group, although characterized by a common reading comprehension difficulty, was partly heterogeneous, as children attended different grades and could have different diagnoses. Unfortunately, the limited number of subjects, with the consequence that it was not possible to form groups defined both by the grade and the diagnosis, did not permit to make analyses taking into account the grade and the diagnosis as between-subjects factors. Future studies should examine a more homogeneous population or consider a larger sample of children, giving more information about the efficacy of training in different children population. Additionally, the fact that the treatment was concluded with the post-training assessment did not offer the opportunity to further examine the procedure and maintenance effects with a follow-up. Despite the limitations, this study offers evidence concerning the efficacy of new methods, based on computer-assisted training programs that could be beneficial in training high-level skills such as comprehension and inference generation. Such tools can be extremely worthwhile for struggling readers who may need to receive further attention in mastering higher level reading comprehension.
Data Availability Statement
The datasets generated for this study are available on request to the corresponding author.
Ethics Statement
Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin. Written informed consent was obtained from the individual(s) for the publication of any potentially identifiable images or data included in this article.
Author Contributions
AC, CC and BC contributed to the design and implementation of the research. LB provided the data. BC organized the database. AC performed the statistical analysis. ED did the literature research and wrote the section about the review of the literature. AC and BC wrote the other sections. CC contributed to the manuscript revision, read and approved the submitted version.
The present work was carried out within the scope of the research program Dipartimenti di Eccellenza (art.1, commi 314-337 legge 232/2016), which was supported by a grant from MIUR to the Department of General Psychology, University of Padua and partially supported by a grant (PRIN 2015, 2015AR52F9_003) to Cesare Cornoldi funded by the Italian Ministry of Research and Education (MIUR).
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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Keywords : reading comprehension, training, distance rehabilitation program, digital device, Cloze app
Citation: Capodieci A, Cornoldi C, Doerr E, Bertolo L and Carretti B (2020) The Use of New Technologies for Improving Reading Comprehension. Front. Psychol. 11:751. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00751
Received: 20 November 2019; Accepted: 27 March 2020; Published: 23 April 2020.
Reviewed by:
Copyright © 2020 Capodieci, Cornoldi, Doerr, Bertolo and Carretti. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Agnese Capodieci, [email protected] ; Laura Bertolo, [email protected]
This article is part of the Research Topic
New Educational Technologies and Their Impact on Students' Well-being and Inclusion Process

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