Linda Baker

Comprehension Monitoring: Identifying and Coping with Text Confusions

Comprehension monitoring was investigated by asking college students to read and answer probed recall questions about passages that contained intentionally introduced confusions. Subjects were then told that confusions had been present and were asked to describe them and comment on how they affected comprehension. Subjects failed to report a surprisingly large proportion of the confusions. Confusions involving main points were detected more frequently than those involving details and confusions of inconsistent information and unclear reference were more often reported than inappropriate connectives. Retrospective reports revealed that failures to report confusions were often not due to failures to monitor comprehension but rather to the use of repair stategies to resolve the potential problems.

Effects of Inconsistent Information on Text Processing: Evidence for Comprehension Monitoring.

EXPOSITORY PASSAGES containing either main point inconsistencies, detail inconsistencies, or no inconsistencies were presented sentence by sentence to 90 college students. Subjects read through the passages at their own pace and were encouraged to reread previous sections of text whenever they wished. As expected, subjects spent more time on sentences containing information that conflicted with information presented elsewhere, and they looked back more often at inconsistent sentences. These modifications in processing indicate that the subjects monitored their comprehension as they were reading, evaluating whether the ideas expressed in the text were consistent with one another. Several post-reading measures provided additional support for this conclusion. The relationship between text processing and subsequent identification of the inconsistencies was also examined. Individual and intra-individual differences were found both in processing strategies and in detection of the inconsistencies.

The Role of Parents in Motivating Struggling Readers.

Interest is currently high among researchers and practitioners on the role of the family and the value of home-school collaborations in promoting childrens motivation for reading. The purposes of this article are (1) to inform practitioners working with struggling readers of the latest research on home influences on reading motivation, and (2) to provide research-based suggestions to teachers as to how they might enlist the assistance of parents in motivating struggling readers. Research has shown that supportive home environments foster motivation for reading, which leads to more frequent voluntary reading, which improves reading achievement. Many collaborative interventions involving home and school have enhanced the reading motivation of struggling readers as they enhanced comprehension.

Spontaneous versus instructed use of multiple standards for evaluating comprehension: Effects of age, reading proficiency, and type of standard☆

Abstract Nine- and eleven-year-old children differing in reading proficiency read and commented on brief expository passages containing three different types of embedded problems (nonsense words, prior knowledge violations, and internal inconsistencies). Half of the children were specifically instructed as to the types of standards they should apply in order to detect the problems (lexical, external consistency, and internal consistency); the remaining children were simply instructed to look for problems. Both quantitative and qualitative differences in standard use were revealed by the childrens comments about all parts of the passages. Older and better readers used more different standards and they used them more frequently than younger and poorer readers. The lexical standard was more likely to be adopted spontaneously than the other two standards and it was the only standard used by a substantial proportion of both younger and poorer readers. Finally, the consistent effects of instruction type indicate that childrens evaluation activities were strongly influenced by the amount of guidance received.

Differences in the Standards Used by College Students to Evaluate Their Comprehension of Expository Prose.

COLLEGE STUDENTS differing in verbal ability read and evaluated their comprehension of expository passages. Three different types of problems were embedded within the passages to provide opportunities for students to reveal the use of different standards of evaluation. Half of the subjects were informed that they should use three particular standards in order to identify the problems (lexical, external consistency, and internal consistency); the remaining subjects were not given specific information as to the standards they should use. All problems subjects identified, regardless of whether or not they were intentionally introduced, were classified as to the type of standard they reflected. The classification scheme consisted of the three targeted standards plus four others: syntax, propositional cohesiveness, structural cohesiveness, and informational completeness. Of particular concern were differences in the standards adopted by students receiving specific instructions and those receiving general instructions. Use of the lexical standard did not differ with instructional specificity, suggesting that students spontaneously evaluate their understanding of individual words. However, students receiving general instructions rarely used the external and internal consistency standards, suggesting these are not criteria students typically adopt. Instead, they commented frequently on the structural cohesiveness of the passages. Additionally, students with higher verbal ability exhibited more frequent and more varied standard use than those with lower verbal ability.

Processing temporal relationships in simple stories: Effects of input sequence

Three experiments examined the effect of input sequence on memory for simple stories, After reading stories written in either chronological or flashback sequence, subjects made a decision about the underlying order of occurrence of two events. Responses were consistently faster and more accurate on chronological sequences under three conditions of testing: (1) immediately after reading, (2) after a 10-sec unfilled interval, and (3) after a 10-sec filled interval. It was also shown that decisions about input order were easier than decisions about underlying order when the stories contained flashbacks. These data indicate that subjects based their responses on a memory representation which preserved the input sequence of events. Results are interpreted as evidence against a strong schema-based approach to story memory which predicts construction of a canonically-ordered representation during processing. An additional finding was that decisions were easier when the events in the story had a logical progression rather than an arbitrary ordering, demonstrating an influence of prior knowledge.

Parental Beliefs about Ways to Help Children Learn to Read: The Impact of an Entertainment or a Skills Perspective.

The Early Childhood Project is a longitudinal investigation of the contexts in which children from different sociocultural groups learn to read. The data discussed here were collected from 41 families when the focal children were in prekindergarten and kindergarten. Data sources were diary reports of childrens activities, parental answers to interview questions, and childrens performance on a broad‐based battery of literacy‐related tasks. Parents’ responses to a question about the most effective way to help their child learn to read were coded for an entertainment perspective or a skills perspective. There was some consistency between parental beliefs about how to foster reading development and the nature of experiences made available to the children. That is, parents having an entertainment perspective spontaneously reported in their diaries that their child engaged in more such activities. Taking the view that literacy is a source of entertainment was positively related to childrens scores on the lit...

Evaluating information for truthfulness: the effects of logical subordination.

Research has shown that many individuals do not routinely evaluate new information for consistency with respect to what they already know. One factor that may affect the likelihood of critical evaluation is whether or not the information is the central focus of the message. Two experiments tested this possibility by establishing differential emphasis of false information within complex sentences. Half of the target sentences contained a false fact in the main clause and half contained a false fact in the subordinate clause. In Experiment 1 subjects verified 64 sentences presented orally as either true or false. In Experiment 2 subjects read and evaluated 20 paragraphs for the presence of false information. As expected, subjects were less likely to report the false information when it was conveyed as logically subordinate rather than central. The results suggest one explanation for deficits in comprehension monitoring and have implications for understanding susceptibility to persuasive communications.

Context, integration, and retrieval.

Three experiments examined the effectiveness of external retrieval cues when encoding context varied with respect to the integration of the representation. In all three experiments, it was found that nonencoded cues led to greater improvement if the initial representation was not well integrated. Strong-associate cues led to more improvement when encoding context consisted of weak-associate pairs than when the pairs were embedded in sentences (Experiment 1). The cues were more effective when subjects studied a list of words without instructions than when they were instructed to form images integrating the list members (Experiment 2). The third experiment demonstrated that well integrated material takes longer to access, and a control experiment argued against an encoding interpretation of the data. The results demonstrated both a flexibility of retrieval and a restriction from context, such that the better the representation, the harder it is to retrieve using external retrieval cues.

Rhyme and Alliteration Sensitivity and Relevant Experiences among Preschoolers from Diverse Backgrounds

There exists a well-established positive relation between phonological awareness and learning to read. Experiences with linguistic routines like nursery rhymes may provide one route through which children gain phonological awareness. The phonological awareness and home experiences of 59 prekindergartners from different sociocultural groups were examined. Performance differences favoring middle-income children over their low-income counterparts were obtained on tasks assessing rhyme and alliteration sensitivity and nursery-rhyme knowledge. Middle-income children also engaged more frequently than low-income children in word games and book interactions at home. The only significant difference among children of the same income level was that African-American low-income children displayed lower levels of nursery-rhyme knowledge than European-American low-income children. Two demographic variables, maternal education and ethnicity, made significant contributions to rhyme sensitivity. Among the experiential variables, the strongest correlates of rhyme sensitivity were nursery-rhyme knowledge and frequency of engagement in word games and book interactions. The results suggest that childrens rhyme sensitivity may be influenced by engagement in word games and book interactions that foster knowledge of linguistic routines containing rhyme.