Using Self-Assessment and Remediation to Raise Middle School Student Achievement in Reading Comprehension

Cognitive Structure Analysis (CSA) is an educational framework designed to help students identify and address knowledge deficits through self-assessment, enabling them to remediate gaps in understanding. Previous studies have demonstrated the reliability of teaching students to use CSA to assess their own knowledge in various academic disciplines, including calculus (Cynkin and Leddo, 2023) and chemistry (Dandemraju, Dandemraju, and Leddo, 2024). These studies, however, primarily focused on the identification of knowledge gaps rather than their remediation. As accurate assessment does not inherently address deficiencies, later studies began to investigate CSA’s role in addressing the gap. Ravi and Leddo (2024) conducted a study in which students learned an advanced chemistry topic by watching a video. Half of the students rewatched to reinforce their understanding, while the other half were trained to use CSA to selfassess their knowledge and then rewatched the video specifically to remediate assessed knowledge gaps. The CSA-trained group outperformed the control group by 15 points (1.5 letter grades) on a post-test. Similarly, Nehra and Leddo (2024) replicated this approach in Spanish instruction, finding that CSA-trained students scored an average of 25 percentage points (2.5 letter grades) higher than those who simply reread the material without self assessing. Prakash and Leddo (2025a) built on the findings of Ravi and Leddo (2024) and Nehra and Leddo (2024) by investigating CSA’s plus remediation’s applicability to reading comprehension; post-test results displayed that the CSA-trained group scored an average of 93%, outperforming the control group’s 69%. Prakash and Leddo (2025b) built on prior research by investigating the applicability of CSA in learning Bayes’ Theorem, a foundational concept in probability theory and statistics. Post-test results revealed that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group, scoring an average of 85.5% compared to the control group’s 58.5%. These findings underscore CSA’s potential to improve understanding of abstract mathematical concepts while fostering self-directed learning. The investigation of CSA was continued through analyzing its impact in history, where post-test results revealed the significant statistical difference between the control and experimental groups, the control scoring an average of 65.8% compared to the experimental group’s 87.5% (Prakash and Leddo, 2025c). Leddo, Clark and Clark (2025) extended the previous work on high school students and found that selfassessment using CSA plus remediation improved math scores by 18 percentage points compared to remediation without self-assessment. This study continues this investigation of CSA plus remediation applicability in the context of middle school students’ ability to comprehend a reading passage, particularly that of To Kill a Mockingbird, a literary classic discussing ethical implications and societal constructs in the realm of prejudice. Twenty middle school students were randomly assigned to either the control or experimental group. Post-test results revealed the control scoring an average of 61.7% as opposed to the experimental’s 78.3% (t=3.31, df = 18, p = .004).