Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

Re:Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on profi... by ip26 on Thursday October 18, 2018 @02:42PM (#18250969)

I read a ton as a kid, and I always struggled a bit on reading comprehension tests. To me it generally seemed like the "reading comprehension" questions would focus on minutia I didn't consider important, and simply didn't bother to remember. It's been a long time since then, but I want to say I'd read a story about a kid sledding on a hill with his friends, and then later to test your reading comprehension they'd ask you what color his shirt was.

Maybe that is reading comprehension and I am just bad at it, but to me shirt color was unimportant.

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Re:Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on profi... by snowwrestler on Thursday October 18, 2018 @04:44PM (#18251951)

I can't imagine why just memorizing shirt colors would be worthwhile.

But if, for example, the author made it clear that the other kids were all wearing the same color shirt and the main character was not, you might infer something about their relationship from that--like maybe that the other kids all went to the same school, but the lead character went to a different school.

Details do matter for reading comprehension, because every detail is chosen. The real world is full of superfluous detail... writing, especially good writing, is not. Every word on the page represents a choice by the author--a choice to put that detail in, and to use that particular word instead of a different one.

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Re:Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on profi... by Jach on Thursday October 18, 2018 @06:06PM (#18252570)

The color thing maybe is an indirect test to see if you're actually imagining the scene vividly, instead of thinking of it as some abstract "sledding" activity. It's not really memorization... Though literal imagining of things is something not everyone can do, so it also seems out of place on a reading comprehension test.

Personally I don't really appreciate any comprehension tests that can be answered somewhat easily by computers, which the "shirt color" thing could be. And tests that are hacked by simple human algorithms are boring. In elementary school I got really far ahead in extra credit reading packets by realizing I could skip the reading and just go straight to the questions, skim for the answer, repeat. Somehow I think that certain peers in high school never mastered this trick since they were complaining about lack of time on the ACT... The better test of comprehension was to read something and then write about it, but the writing section of the ACT was separated and made optional.

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Re:Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on profi... by TallGuyShort on Thursday October 18, 2018 @05:01PM (#18252082)

And yet standardized test writers seem to think they understand those choices better than the authors themselves.

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Re:Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on profi... by snowwrestler on Thursday October 18, 2018 @05:41PM (#18252391)

Critics have an opportunity to understand those choices better than the authors themselves because critics have the opportunity to look at the work from a different perspective.

Just because every bit of writing is a choice, that doesn't mean the author him- or herself fully understood why they made that choice. We're all shaped by our own life experiences, our family, the time in which we grew up, etc. Often, it's easier for a third party to connect those dots. That's why coaching and therapy works, for instance.

That said, when we're talking about standardized tests, they tend to (and should be) sticking to pretty well-understood and obvious examples of this sort of thing.

And of course, sometimes they're just not well done. Standardized test writers face the same challenges as every other writer, and I think we can guess that the very best writers probably do not end up in that job...

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Re:Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on profi... by TallGuyShort on Thursday October 18, 2018 @07:36PM (#18253255)

I'm sorry you completely lost me in the second paragraph. If reading comprehension comes anywhere near connecting an author's life experience to their word choice, then I'll gladly take my 0 and call the whole thing garbage. Sure, coaching and therapy work. They're also fields that churn out massive amounts of pseudo-science when it suits the author's ego.

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Re:Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on profi... by Aeolun on Friday October 19, 2018 @12:56AM (#18254328)

If I do not understand why I write something, then some critic that cannot see into my mind is hardly going to make a better effort. Anything they said would be mostly speculation.

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Re:Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on profi... by im3w1l on Friday October 19, 2018 @05:13AM (#18255320)

You aren't supposed to read the text and then answer the questions from memory.

You are supposed to look at the question and then find the answer in the text.

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