The intervention, known as the Hierarchical Questioning Strategy (HQS), is grounded in a deceptively straightforward idea: comprehension develops in stages, and readers must consolidate factual, literal understanding before they can reliably infer implicit meanings or critique an author’s argument. The researchers operationalized this through a Literal–Inferential–Evaluative (L-I-E) sequence. At the literal level, students retrieve explicitly stated information—facts, main ideas, sequences of events. At the inferential level, they combine textual evidence with background knowledge to read between the lines, identifying cause and effect, author tone, and unstated themes. At the evaluative level, they render critical judgments, take positions, and assess the strength of arguments. Each rung of the ladder is verified before the next is attempted, ensuring that no student is asked to analyze a text they have not yet decoded.

The theoretical architecture behind this sequence draws on several well-established frameworks. Schema theory, as articulated by cognitive scientist David Rumelhart, holds that readers use existing mental frameworks to decode explicit textual facts, forming the literal foundation of comprehension. Levels of Comprehension theory adds that mastering literal detail is a prerequisite for inferential and evaluative processing. The strategy also operationalizes Lev Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development: the literal tier establishes a student’s independent baseline, the inferential tier introduces a guided challenge just beyond it, and the evaluative tier pushes learners toward the upper bound of their potential. When text difficulty outstrips a learner’s linguistic capacity, working memory becomes consumed by mechanical decoding, leaving no cognitive resources for higher-level processing—a barrier that drives frustration and disengagement. The HQS is designed precisely to prevent that overload.

The study’s context gives these findings particular urgency. English has been Ethiopia’s medium of instruction in secondary and higher education for more than a century, yet many Ethiopian EFL students remain at a surface-level grasp of texts. The researchers point to two systemic problems: local instructional materials often lack a balanced distribution of cognitive question levels, and universities rarely provide explicit comprehension training. Traditional Ethiopian reading instruction follows a pre-, while-, and post-reading framework, but its implementation leans heavily on skimming, scanning, and vocabulary work—surface-level skills—while inferential and evaluative comprehension is largely overlooked. The preparation gap is severe: national data cited in the study indicate that only 3.2 percent of high school seniors achieved passing marks on higher education entrance examinations, meaning incoming freshmen often arrive with low reading self-efficacy and significant literacy deficits.

To test whether structured questioning could close that gap, the research team, led by Endalfer Melese Moges with advisors Dagne Tiruneh Dinsa and Tewodros Zeleke Mendida, employed a non-equivalent control group quasi-experimental design. Participants were pre-medicine freshmen enrolled in a compulsory Communicative English Language Skills course. Two intact class sections were selected, and a lottery assigned one to the experimental condition (n = 53) and the other to the control condition (n = 54). The experimental group received eighteen fifty-minute sessions of explicit HQS instruction over four months, following a gradual release of responsibility model: the instructor first explained and modeled each questioning level, then guided collaborative practice, and finally stepped back for independent application. The control group followed the conventional module-based routine of background activation, silent reading, and standard comprehension questions without explicit cognitive scaffolding.

The researchers took extensive precautions to protect the validity of the comparison. The same instructor taught both conditions using scripted lesson plans, classes were scheduled on different days and shifts to block peer communication between groups, and intervention materials were password-protected and tracked. Fidelity was monitored through unannounced supervisor observations using a standardized checklist. Before the intervention, independent-samples t-tests confirmed the groups were statistically equivalent in both reading achievement and self-efficacy, with p-values well above the significance threshold. The instruments themselves were rigorously validated: a 35-item reading comprehension test spanning all three cognitive levels showed strong test–retest reliability (r = 0.89), open-ended items achieved high inter-rater agreement (Cohen’s kappa = 0.87), and a 16-item reading self-efficacy questionnaire adapted from Bandura’s framework yielded a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.846.

The post-intervention results were dramatic. The experimental group’s mean reading comprehension score rose to 11.87, compared with 9.50 for the control group, and the corresponding self-efficacy means were 4.27 versus 3.65 on a five-point scale. Independent-samples t-tests found highly significant differences favoring the experimental group on both outcomes (p < 0.001). A one-way MANOVA produced a Wilks’ Lambda of 0.224 with a partial eta squared of 0.776, meaning group membership accounted for 77.6 percent of the variance in the combined outcome measures—an exceptionally large multivariate effect. Follow-up univariate analyses showed the intervention explained 74 percent of the variance in reading scores and 41 percent of the variance in self-efficacy. The effect size for reading achievement, Cohen’s d = 1.67, sits far beyond the benchmarks typically used to define a large educational effect.

The psychological mechanism, the authors argue, is as important as the cognitive one. Drawing on Albert Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory, they contend that mastery experiences—successive, incremental personal triumphs—are the most powerful catalyst for self-efficacy. As students progressed through the L-I-E stages, each verified success at one level built the confidence needed to attempt the next. The structured progression, they suggest, shifts a learner’s orientation from affective apprehension to cognitive agency: reading ceases to be a passive decoding exercise and becomes an active, goal-directed process. Notably, the intervention’s effect on actual achievement was more pronounced than its effect on self-perceived capability, which the researchers interpret as evidence that self-efficacy may adapt more gradually, partially mediated by historical academic self-concepts and broader external variables.

The findings carry clear implications for classrooms well beyond Ethiopia. Globally, university students show a steep proficiency drop when moving from literal to higher-order tasks—one cited analysis found success rates falling from 56 percent on literal reading to just 22 percent on evaluative tasks. The Jimma results suggest that this drop is not an inevitable feature of foreign-language reading but a consequence of instruction that demands evaluative output without first securing the literal baseline. The authors recommend that instructors enforce sequential mastery, ensuring students demonstrate solid factual understanding before introducing abstract interpretation; that teacher educators institutionalize training in hierarchical questioning through workshops and peer coaching; and that curriculum developers revise tertiary EFL materials to prioritize deep textual analysis over superficial comprehension checks.

The study’s limitations temper, but do not erase, its promise. The sample was small, non-randomized, and drawn from a single pre-medicine cohort at one university, and the four-month intervention cannot reveal whether gains persist once scaffolding is removed. Self-report bias in the efficacy measure and unmeasured differences in teacher expertise are additional caveats. The authors call for randomized controlled trials across multiple sites, longitudinal designs tracking retention, and qualitative triangulation through classroom observation and student interviews. Even so, the core message is likely to resonate widely: questioning, often treated as a tool for checking recall, can be reimagined as a dynamic instructional engine—one that simultaneously builds the critical reading skills students need for academic survival and the self-belief they need to keep reading when texts get hard.

Subject of Research: Effect of hierarchical questioning strategy on EFL reading comprehension and self-efficacy among Ethiopian university freshmen

Article Title: Improving freshman EFL reading comprehension and self-efficacy through hierarchical questioning

Article References: Moges, E. M., Dinsa, D. T., & Mendida, T. Z. (2026). Improving freshman EFL reading comprehension and self-efficacy through hierarchical questioning. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1086. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02192-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02192-4

Keywords: hierarchical questioning, reading comprehension, self-efficacy, EFL, higher education, Ethiopia, quasi-experimental design, cognitive scaffolding, Bloom's taxonomy, Zone of Proximal Development, language education, instructional design