Profiling the differences in strategy use in online multimodal reading: Associations with self-efficacy and reading task performance

In today’s digital era, students must use effective strategies to comprehend multimodal texts online. International language curriculum and assessment programs (e.g., PIRLS and PISA) have advanced to evaluate students’ reading performance in this regard. However, research is lacking on how these strategies relate to reading performance, especially in assessments. Existing literature has also overlooked the role of psychological factors, such as self-efficacy. This study addresses these gaps with 280 fourth-grade students in Hong Kong answering a questionnaire and an online multimodal reading task. Latent profile analysis was used, and three distinct profiles of the strategy use were found. Further analysis revealed positive but not necessarily significant relationships between reading strategy use profiles and reading performance. Varying roles of self-efficacy beliefs was also found to influence students’reading strategy use profiles. The study concludes with pedagogical implications for fostering competent multimodal readers and the theoretical contribution to the literature.

Data Availability

The data used in this study will be available upon request.