Background: Most studies in the field of reading have focused on the linguistic and cognitive factors. Less is known about the affective aspects of reading in young readers, such as self-perceptions of reading, and reading anxiety. Aims: This study aimed to shed light on the direct and indirect relations between reading and related skills (working memory, emergent literacy skills, word reading accuracy and rate, and gender) as sources of reading affect (reading self-concept and anxiety). Sample: A total of 115 Hebrew speaking second graders participated in this study. Methods: A set of measures assessing reading accuracy and rate, emergent literacy skills (phonological fluency, rapid automatized naming and working memory) and reading affect questionnaires (reading self-concept and reading anxiety) were administered to the participants. Results: Path analysis was used as the primary analytic approach. Results indicated a negative moderate relation between reading self-concept and reading anxiety. The relations of working memory and emergent literacy to reading self-concept and reading anxiety were indirect via word reading accuracy and reading rate. Girls reported higher reading anxiety and lower reading self-concept, despite higher performance in reading accuracy and no difference in reading rate. Conclusion: The current results support the importance of examining reading affect and potential sources of reading affect. Results suggest that reading self-concept and reading anxiety and their related skills should be considered in designing reading intervention and instructions.

Research on reading development has focused on the linguistic, cognitive, and recently, metacognitive skills children must master in order to learn to read. Less focus has been devoted to how the text itself, namely the perceptual features of the words, affects children’s learning and comprehension. In this study, we manipulated perceptual properties of text by presenting reading passages in different font sizes, line lengths, and line spacing to 100 children in the second and fifth grades. For second graders (Experiment 1), decreasing font size, as well as increasing line length, yielded significantly lower comprehension scores. Line spacing had no effect on performance. For fifth graders (Experiment 2), decreasing font size yielded higher comprehension scores, yet there were no effects for line length and line spacing. Results are discussed within a "desirable difficulty" approach to reading development.

Multiple text integration is an important skill in modern society, required in heterogeneous situations, across many disciplines and in daily life. It is a complex skill that builds on bottom-up and top-down processes (Britt and Rouet, 2012). As a complex skill it has been measured in the literature using different techniques. To date, the different ways in which researchers have defined and operationalized the term have not been reviewed. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to review how multiple text integration has been theoretically and empirically assessed. The current paper reviews which texts were typically used, which aspects of integration were assessed, and with which scoring rubrics. Finally, we propose that despite the diverse use of tasks, important features of multiple text integration are missing from current research.