Rielke Bogaert

PhD student at the research group 'Language, learning, innovation', within the Department of Educational Sciences, Ghent University.

rielke.bogaert@ugent.be  |  +32 (0)9 331 03 19    |  +32 (0)9 264 86 64 (secretariat)  |    Office 120.102

Researchgate   |   Linkedin   |   Twitter         

Henri Dunantlaan 2, 9000 Gent

Reading comprehension

Response-to-intervention

Late elementary education

1.5 billion websites, social media, e-books, ... Students are overwhelmed with a lot of information today! In this regard, skills such as processing and understanding informative texts are becoming increasingly important in the transition from primary to secondary education.

Despite this importance, we hear confrontational results in the media. “Flemish students perform poorly for reading comprehension; fell sharply in 10 years” is one of the headlines after an international survey on reading comprehension (PIRLS, 2017). In many articles and debates, Flemish education on reading comprehension skills is criticized. These confrontational research results make us realize that reading comprehension skills in our education deserve continued attention. However, schools already pay a lot of attention to language, language promotion and reading comprehension skills. On the other hand, stimulating language and reading comprehension skills within today's diverse society, is a very challenging task that teachers and schools have to deal with today. 

This research project focuses on reading comprehension of students in late elementary education. Throughout elementary education, the focus changes from learn to read informative texts to read to learn from informative texts. Late elementary education therefore forms a critical period in the development of effective reading strategies. From 2018 to 2019, a large-scale study was set up in which the comprehension reading skills of Flemish pupils were mapped, as well as good practical examples of comprehension reading instruction. Starting from the results obtained within this first study, a differentiated intervention study will be set up to investigate the impact of this intervention on reading comprehension and reading comprehension strategy use of various pupils in late elementary education.

Publications and conferences