Jessica Hering and Benjamin Katz present at 2014 NURD Symposium

Jessica Hering (occupational studies major and psychology minor ’15) and Benjamin Katz (psychology major ’17) recently presented research they are currently conducting with Jennifer Stiegler-Balfour, Ph. D., assistant professor, Psychology Department at the NURD Symposium held at the University of New England.

The presentation, titled “Coherence differences in skilled and less-skilled readers,” examined whether or not reading skill influences the monitoring of both local and global coherence while reading as well as the ability to recall text information.

Results showed that less-skilled readers often did not recognize the inconsistency in text at the global level and also did not show improved recall of portions of the text that require deeper processing. The finding suggest that less-skilled readers do, indeed, struggle with comprehending information that is transferred into their long term memory, and text may need to be altered specifically for less-skilled readers to improve their comprehension.