Comment by ordu

> The student is under stress due to their struggle with the passage, which the author isn't taking creative liberties to describe as that's how most people will react.

It doesn't look for me as a satisfactory explanation. Were they stressed because they were forced to think hard, or were they stressed because they were afraid to show their incompetence to a professor? Or maybe some other reason?

If the process of thought makes students stressed, then I don't know what can be done. But if they were afraid of a professor, then this stress factor could be and should be removed. For example, I can imagine how they chose to guess instead of thinking things through because they felt that a long thinking can look bad in professor's eyes. If so then students didn't even tried to read carefully, they were guessing, and the question arise: what the study had measured in this case?

> And, with all due respect, I think you're probably giving yourself more credit for your ability to perform better than these students than what might be the actual result

Why do you think so? I have read the text, I really spent some time on it, because it was hard for me (I mentioned specifically that I was confused for a minute by "but newly" stuffed inside of "had retired"). Then I read samples of students interpretations of the text. I believe that this is enough by itself to believe that I was better. For example, I understood that there was no megalosaurus despite being confused by "but newly". Still I had looked into the original article and had found the interpretation of a "single proficient reader", to compare it with what I've got from the text. The most interesting finding: they completely ignored megalosaurus like I did.

The only catch is I've read just one paragraph, while students were reading more of them, but I don't think it will change the results significantly. I can become bored or overconfident and students can get hang of Dickens' language after a couple of paragraphs so they will show better performance than me, but I don't believe it.