Can Text Mining Support Reading Comprehension?

Text mining is a research field that has developed different techniques to find relevant information in unstructured data, such as texts. This article tries to verify whether the automatic extraction of information from texts can help students in reading comprehension activities. Two studies involving control and experimental groups were carried out with students of 5th and 8th grade in order to evaluate whether a particular text mining tool could effectively help students improve their scores in a reading task. We also wanted to verify if the use of the tool by students in different grades could yield different outcomes. Results showed that the mining tool helped 5th graders to improve their scores, but it was not so effective for 8th graders. These results indicate the potential of the proposed tool especially for learners who are still developing their reading skills.

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