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. 2022 Mar;92(1):258-279.
doi: 10.1111/bjep.12448. Epub 2021 Jul 26.

Control and value appraisals and online multiple-text comprehension in primary school: The mediating role of boredom and the moderating role of word-reading fluency

Daniela Raccanello  1 , Elena Florit  1 , Margherita Brondino  1 , Antonio Rodà  2 , Lucia Mason  3
Affiliations

Control and value appraisals and online multiple-text comprehension in primary school: The mediating role of boredom and the moderating role of word-reading fluency

Daniela Raccanello et al. Br J Educ Psychol. 2022 Mar.

Abstract

Background: Online multiple-text comprehension is a key skill of the 21st Century, yet the study of its relations with boredom in young students has been disregarded. Boredom is an achievement emotion expected to be predicted negatively by antecedents like control and value appraisals and to be associated to a negative performance. Notwithstanding its documented domain-specificity, scarce attention has been paid to investigating these relations with primary-school students in the reading domain, and specifically for online multiple-text comprehension, and to how such relations are moderated by basic cognitive abilities.

Aims: Considering separately two settings (homework, test), we studied the mediation of boredom in the relation between control-value appraisals and online multiple-text comprehension in primary-school students, focusing on the moderating role of word-reading fluency.

Sample: Participants were 334 fourth and fifth graders.

Methods: We evaluated students' reading-related self-efficacy and task-value, reading-related boredom for homework and tests, word-reading fluency, and online multiple-text comprehension.

Results: Path analyses revealed negative relations between control-value appraisals and boredom for homework and tests, and between boredom and online multiple-text comprehension for tests only. For the latter, word-reading fluency moderated the relation between appraisals, boredom, and comprehension: Boredom negatively related to comprehension only for students with high word-reading fluency.

Conclusions: Findings are discussed focusing on antecedents of online multiple-text comprehension as a literacy skill critical in the 21st Century. We underlined their implications for learning in general and specifically for the current educational changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Keywords: boredom; control; online multiple-text comprehension; task-value; word-reading fluency.

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Conflict of interest statement

All authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Path analyses for relations between control, task‐value, boredom, and online multiple‐text comprehension for (a) homework setting; (b) test setting; (c) tests and low word‐reading fluency; (d) tests and high word‐reading fluency. Indices for explained variance are reported next to each dependent variable. *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001.
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