A study in reading comprehension improvement

As everyday computing plays an increasingly prominent role in our daily lives, user reading comprehension is of vital importance for human progress. This paper proposes to investigate the improvement of the user reading comprehension by different factors. Two main experiments tested how an explicit display of a small collection of keywords and a summary explanation aid reading comprehension. Twelve subjects were used for the first experiment and eight subjects for the second experiment. All were UIC undergraduate and graduate students, with computer experience. In the post experimentation stage, the subjects recommended different techniques for reading improvement. Comprehension was estimated by two procedures, a quantitative evaluation by a comprehension questionnaire and a qualitative evaluation by the subjective report. Important results were pointed out by the subjective evaluation. The advantages and disadvantages were summarized by a small focus group of users. A Dynamic Reading Device was designed for experimentation usage.