Article 26th (Cognitive Flexibility Deficits in Children with Specific Reading Comprehension Difficulties)

The problem of reading comprehension affects a large number of primary school children. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, one-third of fourth graders in the United States cannot understand the text at a basic level, requiring simple conclusions and extraction of information from the text, and two-thirds of US fourth graders can not understand text at the level proficient, reflecting the ability to integrate information, draw conclusions, and evaluate texts. Recently, executive functioning has emerged as a significant predictor of reading comprehension problems in children who show specific reading comprehension difficulties (RCD) in the absence of decoding difficulties.  Executive functioning contributes uniquely to RCD beyond traditional predictors, such as decoding ability and vocabulary.

These studies were designed to examine the contribution of cognitive flexibility, the least well studied of the three core executive functions, to specific reading comprehension difficulties (RCD). Because children with RCD seem to focus inflexibly on decoding processes, which are age appropriate (or even higher than average) in these students, we hypothesized that students with RCD would be significantly lower in cognitive flexibility than typically developing students. These findings are of particular interest for practitioners who seek effective interventions for children with comprehension deficits and add to the growing body of evidence that executive functioning can underlie learning differences and can also be a useful target of intervention to improve students’ learning, particularly as they learn to comprehend texts.

Annisa Masnasuri Kesai

16611069

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