Assessing and Improving Comprehension With Latent Semantic Analysis

Assessing and improving reading comprehension are crucial goals for educators and psychologists alike. Students across the nation have great difficulty in comprehending what they read. It is therefore important that educators are able to identify students at risk for failing, and to have some procedure available to help students improve their comprehension. Assessment and intervention go hand in hand. To know whether a student has trouble understanding a passage, one must identify whether the student had successfully performed any number of processes related to reading (e.g., word recognition, inferencing, making connections between the current and prior sentences, etc.). And to improve a student’s comprehension, it is likely that the intervention address at least a subset of those same reading processes.