The relationships between lower- and higher-level cognitive skills and multimodal reading comprehension among fourth-grade students in the digital age

Abstract

Multimodal reading skills are essential for 21st-century students to interpret and navigate information across various modalities on the Internet and in multimedia environments. While previous studies have delved into the effects of lower- and higher-level cognitive skills on traditional reading comprehension, which involves solely written texts, relatively, few have investigated their influence in the context of multimodal reading, where texts are combined with images, audio, video, and other modalities. This study aimed to explore the relationships among lower-level cognitive skills (i.e., word decoding, listening comprehension, and image comprehension), higher-level cognitive skills (i.e., prior knowledge and inference), and multimodal reading. A total of 251 fourth grade students from Hong Kong participated in this study. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was conducted to analyze the data. The results indicated that both lower- and higher-level skills positively influence multimodal reading. Moreover, the mediating role of inference between lower-level skills and multimodal reading and the moderating role of word decoding between inference and multimodal reading were identified. This study enriches the literature on the influence of various cognitive factors in the multimodal reading process and offers significant implications for enhancing multimodal reading skills and designing effective instructional strategies. 多模態閱讀能力是21世紀學生在互聯網和多媒體環境下處理跨模態信息 (即文字、圖像、音頻及視頻等多種模態相結合) 的核心技能。以往的研究多關注低階和高階認知技能與以文字理解為主的傳統閱讀理解的關聯, 甚少對多模態閱讀與認知技能之間的關係進行探索。本研究旨在探討低階認知技能 (包括文字解碼、語言理解及圖像理解) 、高階認知技能 (包括背景知識及推理能力) 與多模態閱讀之間的關係。研究對象為251名香港小學四年級學生。透過結構方程模型分析, 本研究發現學生的低階與高階認知技能均顯著正向預測多模態閱讀表現。推理能力在低階認知技能與多模態閱讀之間扮演中介的角色, 而文字解碼能力則在推理與多模態閱讀之間起調節作用。本研究不僅豐富了多模態閱讀與不同認知因素之間關係的理論探討, 還為提升學生多模態閱讀能力 (如設計有效的教學策略) 提供了理論依據和實踐啟示。