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Upcoming Presentations at AERA

Upcoming Presentations at AERA

by Halle Smith -
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Representing the AdultEd research team, Dr. John Sabatini and John Hollander will present their research at the 2022 AERA Annual Meeting. They will be presenting two posters, described below.


April 23, 2022:  In AERA Virtual Poster Room 1, Dr. Sabatini, John Hollander, and Dr. O’Reilly will present “Comparing Foundational Skills of Adolescents to Adult Learners.” In this presentation, the researchers compare the foundational skills results of students in 5th and 8th grade to adults participating in educational programs. Both groups completed a battery of subtests including word recognition/decoding, vocabulary, and morphology. The researchers found different patterns of results across the three groups. Specifically, the adult group showed relatively weaker growth in word recognition/decoding than the adolescents, as well as different error and response time patterns. The study adds to the literature on similarities and differences in adolescent and adult reading skills.

April 26, 2022: In AERA Virtual Poster Room 9, Dr. Sabatini, John Hollander, Dr. O’Reilly, and Dr. Wang will present “A Middle-Grade-Level Trajectory of Reading Component Skills.” This presentation first introduces that reading comprehension involves the efficient coordination of print and linguistic skills. However, reading instruction often shifts in middle school from developing these skills to focusing on discourse-level processes. Reading ability assessments at this level often treat comprehension as a singular skill. Consequently, understanding of how reading subskills develop across ages/grades is underdeveloped. This study examines a dataset of students using a component reading skills assessment. Results indicate differences in word recognition and decoding, vocabulary, and morphological awareness across grade levels. Further, word recognition and decoding error rates indicate how decoding strategies develop. Students become both more accurate and more efficient at identifying vocabulary words and morphological inflections, demonstrating how typical reading instruction may affect reading component skills over time.