PhD defence B.E.J. (Brechtje) van Zeijts

Below is a brief summary of the dissertation: 

Reading comprehension is an important skill for academic success and functioning in society more broadly. However, nowadays, there is more and more information available in spoken form, providing new ways for learning and acquiring information. The dissertation evaluates how children understand informative videos relative to informative texts, and explores the possibilities of audio and video as part of reading comprehension instruction. It describes four experimental studies conducted in the context of Dutch primary education.

Part I of the dissertation focuses on providing insight into how children proceed in understanding information presented in text versus video format. Results showed that understanding texts and videos that present the same information is associated with similar cognitive processes (Chapter 2 and 3). This provides empirical evidence for the theory of a general comprehension skill underlying comprehension of different media. The findings speak against the common assumption that videos are processed more passively or superficially than written text.

These findings provided the foundation for Part II of the dissertation, which focused on investigating whether audio and video materials can be used to foster inferencing. Inferences are implicit relations in a text that readers need to fill in. The ability to recognize these ‘gaps’ of information is an important skill for understanding both written text and non-written media like videos. It was, however, found to be difficult to stimulate the generation of inferences (Chapter 4 and 5), both during reading and during listening to audio and videos.