SUMMARY THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Summary Theoretical Framework

Summary Theoretical Framework

Summary of the Theoretical Framework

Investigating reading comprehension has a long research tradition in psychology. Its importance, however, has grown even more within the frame of international reading literacy studies. Reading skills and abilities have always been important in the educational context, especially nowadays, in the era of information society. These skills represent an effective means for acceptance, organization, and usage of information in different areas. Thus, reading skills and the ability to comprehend written material have become an important cross curriculum competence, which influences one's educational achievement, since the vast majority of information in educational situations is transferred through written materials.

The two key factors of a person's achievement in reading literacy, which is measured through reading comprehension, are: a) various environmental characteristics and features, especially school environment (e.g., reading and writing instructions, the teacher's classroom text processing and reading motivation methods) and family environment (e.g., the number of books a family owns, frequency of parents' reading to children, parents' reading habits in general), and b) psychological characteristics of the students (cognitive, meta cognitive, motivational, and emotional). The aim of our study was to develop a model of reading comprehension which would include different psychological characteristics of the students. First, we examined which Meta) cognitive and motivational-emotional factors determine reading comprehension of 5th grade students and then we proposed a model of reading comprehension for students in general.

Reading comprehension is also affected by emotions and mood, even though their impact is probably indirect through their influence on different (Meta) cognitive factors. In this manner, emotions would result in reading comprehension through their effect on working memory (Armbruster, 1985). Negative emotions preoccupy working memory in such a manner that an individual is more concerned with his own negative emotions than cognitive task demands. The attitude ...