Eileen Kintsch

Children's comprehension and memory for stories☆

Abstract Sixteen 4-year-olds and sixteen 6-year-olds were shown four picture stories consisting of 15 to 18 pictures without text. The stories were well structured, consisting of two or more causally and temporally related episodes. The children were asked to describe each picture, and, after seeing all the pictures of a story, to recall the story without pictures. The pictures were either presented in their normal order or in scrambled order. The data analysis concentrated upon the comparison between the responses in the normal condition when the children were telling a story and in the scrambled condition, when they were merely responding to the pictures as such without the story context. The results showed that even the 4-year-olds, but especially the older children, were interpreting the pictures as stories in the normal condition and that their knowledge about stories, i.e., the story schema, determined the nature of their responses. Even in the scrambled condition the 6-year-olds tried to make sense of the pictures in terms of a story by making inferences, attributing thoughts and emotions to the characters, and using narrative conventions, while the 4-year-olds often reverted to a simple labeling strategy. In recall all of these trends were emphasized. Those parts of the descriptions that were best integrated into a story were recalled best, while nonintegrated descriptions tended to be forgotten.

SUMMARY STREET ® : COMPUTER SUPPORT FOR COMPREHENSION AND WRITING*

Having students express their understanding of difficult, new material in their own words is an effective method to deepen their comprehension and learning. Summary Street® is a computer tutor that offers a supportive context for students to practice this activity by means of summary writing, guiding them through successive cycles of revising with feedback on the content of their writing. Automatic evaluation of the content of student summaries is enabled by Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). This article describes an experimental study of the comprehension and writing tutor, in which 8th-grade students practiced summary writing over a 4-week period, either with or without the guidance of the tutor. Students using Summary Street® scored significantly higher on an independent comprehension test than the control group for test items that tapped gist level comprehension. Their summaries were also judged to be significantly superior in blind scoring on several measures of writing quality. Students of low-to-moderate achievement levels benefitted most from the tool.

Comprehension Theory as a Guide for the Design of Thoughtful Questions.

This article begins with a brief overview of the psychological research on the pedagogical efficacy of questions and describes how recent research has led to a reevaluation of the role of questions within the framework of a theoretical model of discourse comprehension processes and knowledge representation. A computer-based tutor for reading comprehension under development by our research team is described. The tutor uses an interactive books interface to present a structured sequence of questions to elicit summaries from young readers. The students receive feedback on content coverage by means of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). The questions in the tutor are based on the principled guidelines presented in the final section of this article.

Interlingual Interference and Memory Processes.

Bilingual Ss learned eight-item paired-associate lists with four English and four German words as stimuli and the digits 1–8 as responses. Four translated word pairs wee used as stimulus terms for Experimental lists and unrelated words were used for Control lists. Interlingual interference was observed, in that the Experimental lists were harder to learn than the Control lists. It was concluded that the semantic relationships between words in different languages influence tasks involving secondary memory. No interlingual interference was obtained in a second learning situation which depended mostly upon primary memory.