Hilary Horn Ratner

Children's Comprehension Monitoring and Recall of Inconsistent Stories.

ZABRUCKY, KAREN, and RATNER, HILARY HoRN. Childrens Comprehension Monitoring and Recall of Inconsistent Stories. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1986, 57, 1401-1418. Third and sixth graders (M age = 9.13 and 11.92 years, respectively) were videotaped reading inconsistent stories presented 1 sentence at a time. We assessed childrens comprehension evaluation with onand off-line measures (reading times and verbal reports) and comprehension regulation by measuring look-backs during reading. All children read inconsistencies more slowly than control information, but sixth graders were more likely to look back at inconsistencies during reading and report inconsistencies following reading. In addition, recall and recognition memory were affected by text inconsistencies. Individual difference analyses revealed that evaluation measures were not related to each other and were related to regulation only for younger children. Evaluation measures were also related to recognition and recall of inconsistencies and to overall passage retention for older children. Results highlight the sensitivity of different comprehension monitoring measures in assessing childrens skills and the importance of treating comprehension monitoring as a multidimensional process.

Violence Exposure, IQ, Academic Performance,and Children’s Perception of Safety:Evidence of Protective Effects

Community violence exposure (CVE), a critical urban problem, is associated with negative academic outcomes. Children who report feeling safe, however, may perform better than those who do not. The purpose of this study was to examine the relations among CVE, feelings of safety, and cognitive outcomes among 6- and 7-year-olds born to women receiving prenatal care at an inner-city maternity hospital who participated in a prospective pregnancy study. In addition to obtaining measures of child CVE, IQ, reading, standardized school achievement, and grades, we also evaluated the primary caregiver in order to assess the home and family environment. Greater violence exposure and victimization were related to poorer child outcomes; however, feelings of safety were positively related to most of the cognitive measures, and positive caregiving was related to more optimal cognitive functioning. Increased feelings of safety may allow children to focus on critical school tasks to which they may otherwise be unable to attend.

The role of cuing and organization in children's memory for events☆

Abstract Childrens memory for a standardized, hierarchically organized event, making clay, was tested in two experiments. Immediately after participating in this event and again 2 weeks later, children described how they had made the clay. In Experiment 1, action and object cues were presented but only action cues greatly facilitated recall. Children who remade the clay reported more information and also reported more of the actions most central to the goal of the event during delayed recall. In Experiment 2, verbal cues representing two levels in the event hierarchy were presented, but neither aided recall. These and other patterns in the data indicated that, at most, the rudiments of a hierarchical structure had emerged after a single experience. These results were discussed in terms of their implications for the development and organization of event memories.

Development of memory for events

Abstract The development of event memory is examined here to determine how personally experienced events with two types of structure are reported by kindergartners and adults. Subjects participated individually in two standardized events involving making and playing with clay. The first was organized causally; the second, temporally. Descriptions of these events were examined in interviews conducted for some subjects immediately after the event and for all, a week later. The reports of both children and adults suggested use of a goal-based hierarchical structure to remember events, although use of the structure seemed more fragile for children than adults. The causal structure of the events influenced the amount of information reported. These results were discussed with respect to possible developmental paths in the formation of generalized event representations, or scripts.

Appropriating the Actions of Another: Implications for Children's Memory and Learning.

Perspectives on reality monitoring and sociocultural learning were integrated in four studies of childrens memory of contributions to the outcomes of collaborative exchanges. Children made collages with an adult, and were later surprised with a reality-monitoring task in which they were asked to remember who placed particular pieces on the collage. In three of the four studies, 4-year-olds were more likely to claim they contributed pieces that the adult actually contributed rather than the reverse (Experiments 1–3). This bias was interpreted as evidence for appropriation , a process in which individuals adopt another persons actions as their own. The extent to which children committed misattribution errors depended on their involvement as decision makers (Experiments 1 and 3) and on the outcomes of the collages themselves (Experiment 2). Importantly, misattribution errors were not simply an expression of encoding failures or response biases (Experiment 4). Implications of these findings for childrens memory and learning are discussed.

Children's recoding in memory for collaboration: A way of learning from others☆

Abstract Children made collages with an adult and were later asked to remember who placed particular pieces on the collage. In three experiments, 4-year-olds were more likely to claim they placed pieces actually placed by the adult than the reverse. This bias to claim “I did it” was also observed in response to distractor pieces, but only if those pieces resembled the ones actually used to make the collages (Experiments 1 and 2). When children were asked to think about how the adult would place her pieces while waiting for their turns, the bias was not evident. Only when children thought of themselves performing the adults actions did the bias occur (Experiment 3). These results are interpreted as evidence that young children recode the actions of other people as their own while thinking about what another person has done or will do. This recoding process is discussed as one mechanism for learning from other people.

The development of children's action memory : when do actions speak louder than words ?

SummaryAlthough acting consistently has been found to improve memory, the reasons for this are unclear. In this investigation, we tested whether acting improves recall by integrating separate elements within an action into an organized whole and whether this process may be strategic. First graders, fourth graders, and college-aged adults listened to, acted out, or watched the performance of action-object phrases and then verbally reported or enacted the phrases. Phrases composed of transitive verbs were expected to be integrated more by action than phrases composed of intransitive verbs, and consequently recalled better, especially by the younger children. Recall increased between first and fourth grades, suggesting that some aspects of action memory may be strategic; however, there was no evidence that acting improves recall by means of integration. The pattern of results suggested that the nature of an actions outcome may contribute to the enactment effect.

Effects of Reading Ability on Children's Comprehension Evaluation and Regulation

Good and poor readers in the sixth grade (M age = 11.92 years) were videotaped reading inconsistent stories presented one sentence at a time. Childrens comprehension evaluation was assessed with on-line (reading times) and verbal report measures; comprehension regulation was assessed by examining look-backs during reading. All children read inconsistencies more slowly than consistent control information but good readers were more likely than poor readers to look back at inconsistencies during reading, to give accurate verbal reports of passage consistency following reading, and to recall text inconsistencies. Results highlight the importance of using multiple comprehension monitoring measures in assessing childrens abilities and of treating comprehension monitoring as a multidimensional process.

COMPREHENSION MONITORING IN GOOD AND POOR READERS: EVIDENCE FROM VERBAL AND PERFORMANCE MEASURES

The present study examined the ability of second grade good and poor readers to monitor their comprehension of inconsistent texts. Comprehension monitoring was assessed by both a performance measure (underlining inconsistencies) as well as verbal measures (ratings of passage comprehensibility and liking). Because poor readers equate adequate comprehension with accurate decoding, while good reader equate adequate comprehension with accurately deriving the meaning of a text, it was expected that performance and verbal measures of comprehension monitoring would be related for good but not for poor readers. As predicted, self‐reports of comprehension and liking were highly related to the performance measure of error detection for good readers but not for poor readers. The implications of these results for assessing comprehension monitoring ability are discussed.

Older and younger adults' memory for structured and unstructured events.

Because the everyday memory demands of older adults often tend to be event-based, a complete view of memory functioning should include assessments of event memory. To this end 48 older and younger adults were asked to participate in one of two hierarchically structured events. They were tested for their memory immediately afterwards and again a week later. The procedural event was composed of a series of actions logically related and ordered in a necessary sequence to accomplish a goal. In contrast, the temporal event was organized with respect to locations and objects within those locations, but no logically necessary relationship or order existed among them. The results indicated that older and younger adults differed less in their recall of statements which summarized the event than in their recall of the actions composing the event. Both young and old benefited by the greater organization inherent in the procedural event but there was some tendency for younger adults to use this information more effectively. Thus, even memory for event-based information is susceptible to age-related decline but this effect appears to be influenced by the structural characteristics of an event.