comp. monitoring 1984 kd 24-06-15

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Comparison of Comprehension Monitoring of Skilled and Less Skilled Readers Author(s): Diane L. August, John H. Flavell and Rene Clift Source: Reading Research Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 39-53Published by: on behalf of the Wiley International Reading AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/747650Accessed: 23-06-2015 22:12 UTC

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Comparison of comprehension monitoring of skilled and less skilled readers

DIANE L. AUGUST JOHN H. FLAVELL RENEE CLIFT Stanford University

THE PURPOSE of this study was to gain a better understanding of the differences in comprehension and comprehension monitoring in reading between skilled and less skilled readers. Sixteen fifth-grade students of each type, matched on intelligence, were given five stories to read on a microcomputer screen. Three of the stories made little sense because a page of the story was purposefully omitted to make the story inconsistent. The skilled readers correctly reported that a page was missing on the inconsistent stories significantly more often than did the less skilled readers. The same trend obtained for the subset of subjects in each group who appeared to detect the problem at some lower level, as evidenced by longer reading times, lookbacks, or the making of unwarranted inferences at the point of the inconsistency. These group differences in comprehension monitoring performance could not be explained by differences in intelligence, decoding skill, or ability to recall crucial story information. In both groups, inferring that is not marked by the subject as hypothetical seemed to account for more failure to report the missing page than any other variable.

Une comparaison du contr6le de comprdhension de lecteurs experimentes et moins experimentes

LE BUT DE CETTE etude 6tait d'acqu6rir un meilleur entendement des diff6rences en compr6hension et contr6le de compr6hension en lecture parmi des lecteurs exp6riment6s et moins exp6riment6s. On a donn6 & seize e61ves de sixieme de chaque type, d'intelligence 6gale, cinq histoires a lire sur un 6cran de micro-ordinateur. Trois de ces histoires n'avaient pas beaucoup de sens parce qu'une page de l'histoire avait 6t6 omise volontairement pour la rendre inconsistante. Les lecteurs exp6riment6s ont rapport6 de faqon correcte qu'une page manquait dans l'histoire inconsistante beaucoup plus souvent que ne l'ont fait les lecteurs moins exp6riment6s. La mime tendance s'est effectu6e pour le sous-ensemble des sujets dans chaque groupe qui semblait d6tecter le problkme a un certain niveau inf6rieur, comme cela a 6t6 d6montr6 par des temps de lecture plus longs, des retours en arriere, ou la production de conclusions injustifi6es la oii l'inconsistance avait lieu. On n'a pas pu expliquer ces diff6rences de groupe dans l'accomplissement du contr6le de comprehension par des diff6rences d'intelligence, des comp6tences de d6chiffrement, ou la capacit6 de se rappeler des informations cruciales dans l'histoire. Dans les deux groupes, la conclusion qui n'est pas marquee par le sujet comme hypoth6tique semblait justifier un plus grand 6chec dans le rapport de la page manquante que dans toute autre variable.

Una comparacidn de comprobaciones de comprensidn de lectores de mds y menos destreza

EL OBJETIVO DE ESTE ESTUDIO era avanzar los conocimientos sobre las diferencias en la comprensi6n y la comprobaci6n de comprensi6n de lectura de lectores hibiles y de los de menos destreza. A 16 alumnos de quinto grado, de ambas destrezas lectoras y equiparados en inteligencia, se proyectaron 5 cuentos para ser leidos en la pantalla de una

39


microcomputadora. Tres de los cuentos tenian poco sentido porque una de las piginas del cuento habia sido intencionadamente omitida para hacer el cuento inconsistente. Los de destreza lectora informaron correctamente la omisi6n de la pigina en los cuentos inconsistentes significativamente con mis frecuencia que los de menos destreza lectora. Se obtuvo la misma tendencia del subgrupo de alumnos en cada grupo que parecia advertir.el problema a un nivel mis bajo, manifestado por lectura de mis duraci6n, relectura, o haciendo inferencias innecesarias en el punto de inconsistencia. Estas diferencias de grupo en la comprobaci6n de comprensi6n, no podian justificarse ser debidas a diferencias de inteligencia, habilidad de descifre, o a la habilidad de recordar puntos importantes del cuento. En ambos grupos, mas que ninguna otra variable, la inferencia que no era indicada por el alumno como hipo-tica, parecia ser mis responsable por la falla de informar la omisi6n de la pigina.

A question that continues to perplex educators is why some younger children and less skilled readers of normal intelligence have difficulty evaluating their own comprehension. Some researchers (Canney & Winograd, 1979; Garner, 1981; Markman, 1977, 1979) suggest that children fail to understand that a message is problematic because they do not integrate material as actively as older or more skilled readers, but instead process the material word by word or sentence by sentence. They do not construct a coherent representation of the entire story that can then be evaluated for consistency, i.e., engage in constructive processing as they read.

Other investigators, mostly in the area of referential communication, contend instead that younger children may process the information in the above constructive fashion but that this processing does not result in conscious awareness of noncomprehension. Children may exhibit nonverbal evidence of noncomprehension (Flavell, Speer, Green, & August, 1981; Ironsmith & Whitehurst, 1978; Patterson, Cosgrove, & O'Brien, 1980) but not report having encountered a problem. Current research on the detection and awareness of textual anomaly also supports the hypothesis that younger children process constructively but do not necessarily show awareness of nonunderstanding (Capelli & Markman, 1981; Harris, Kruithof, Terwogt, & Visser, 1981).

There are several reasons why children who have given evidence of on-line monitoring might not report a problem. Capelli (1982) suggests that these children: (a) may not access the relevant information in making

judgments because of memory constraints, limited processing capability, or insensitivity to cues of nonunderstanding; or (b) may access the necessary information but use it differently than adults in making judgments, i.e., they may set a higher threshold for judging something incomprehensible, have different criteria for what constitutes a problematic message, or give less weight to internal signals of noncomprehension.

Another possible explanation for the lack of problem reporting is that children may make unwarranted inferences to resolve the problem. In a study conducted with college students, Baker (1979) found that subjects might have been better comprehension monitors than the data suggested had they not spontaneously used "fix-up" procedures to resolve the potential confusions. That is, once the subjects established that a confusion existed, they often drew upon prior knowledge to render the text more comprehensible. Garner (1981) suggested that even good seventh- and eighth-grade readers might rate inconsistent messages as "okay" rather than "difficult to understand" because they made assumptions to resolve the inconsistencies. In a pilot study by August (1981), both skilled and less skilled readers made inferences to fill in missing information thus making the message consistent or unambiguous. Differ- ences in problem reporting occurred (skilled readers knew the messages were inconsistent or ambiguous) because unskilled readers did not remember they had made inferences while skilled readers did.

The purpose of the present study was to find out more about factors that contribute to poor comprehension monitoring by comparing

40 READING RESEARCH QUARTERLY * Fall 1984 XX/ 1


skilled and less skilled fifth-grade readers. Children were presented with five stories, three of which had a missing page that made the story inconsistent. It was hypothesized that skilled readers would be likelier than less skilled readers to recognize that a page was missing in the case of these three stories.

Investigators in the area of comprehension monitoring (Garner & Anderson, 1982; Winograd & Johnson, 1980) caution that the results of studies that depend on the error detection paradigm are difficult to explain because there are so many factors that may account for the lack of problem detection besides poor comprehension monitoring. This study attempted to reduce these difficul- ties in the following ways:

1. Children tend to assume that written materials are adequate and are consequently not prepared to look for or find problems in textual materials. In addition, they may fail to judge materials as incomprehensible if their reasons for reading differ from the experimenter's; Baker (1979) found that college students failed to detect problems in their reading material because they were focusing on the main idea, ignoring in the process a sentence that did not fit in. In the present study children were told that some of the stories might have a missing page. This alerted them to the possibility that the materials might be defective and encouraged them to criticize the stories. In addition, it provided them with the same criteria for judging comprehensibility as the experimenter. The stories were considered comprehensible if they did not have a missing page.

2. Poor recall of what has been read or making inferences to fix up the message may account for failure to notice or to report a problem. In this study children were asked to retell the story after reading it. This informed the experimenter whether children had the relevant information to decide if a message was problematic and whether they made unwarranted inferences.

3. Verbal reports of cognitive activities do not necessarily coincide with actual behavior (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). Having children read the stories on a microcomputer provided on-line measures of comprehension monitoring--specifically reading time and

lookbacks at the inconsistent part of the story. These on-line measures were used as indications of whether children were constructively processing the information.

4. Probes often used in previous studies may have affected the children's subsequent performance in ways that were difficult to assess. In this study, by contrast, the children were probed only after they had read the stories once to make sure that the probes would not affect subsequent performance.

5. The nature of the stories influences performance. Garner and Anderson (1982) found differential error detection performance by two comparable groups using a comparable procedure but with different passages. In the present study one half of the subjects in each group read one series of stories and the other half read another series in order to control for story effect. For internal consistency, the error type and its location were always the same in each of the stories.

6. Nonverbal intelligence may account for differences in error detection. Most studies fail to control for this variable. In this study each skilled reader was matched with an unskilled reader on nonverbal intelligence to eliminate intelligence as a factor responsible for between-group differences in comprehension monitoring.

Method

Subjects Thirty-two fifth-grade students from two

school districts in Northern California partic- ipated in this study. The subjects were classified as skilled and less skilled readers on the basis of their scores on the comprehension subtest of the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills, Level 2, Form S (1973), which was administered in April, immediately prior to the study. Skilled readers were defined as those who scored at or above grade level (5.8 or above); less skilled readers were defined as those who scored at least 1 year below grade level (4.7 or below). Children in between (i.e., those who were less than 1 year below grade level) were excluded from this study.

All subjects were also given the Coloured Progressive Matrices Test (Raven, 1962), a

Comparison of comprehension monitoring AUGUST, FLAVELL, & CLIFT 41


nonverbal measure of intelligence. Each skilled reader was paired with an unskilled reader with no more than 1 point difference in their raw IQ scores. Sixteen pairs of subjects were formed. The skilled readers had a mean reading comprehension score of 8.0 (SD = 1.5, range = 5.8 to 9.9). The less skilled readers had a mean reading comprehension score of 3.5 (SD = .80; range = 2.3 to 4.7). A t-test indicated that these scores were significantly different, t(15) = 10.46, p = .0001. On the Coloured Progressive Matrices Test both groups had the same mean score of 29.43, with a range of 25 to 35. Standard deviations were 3.4 and 3.1 for the skilled and less skilled readers, respectively.

To make sure that all subjects would be able to decode the words in the test material, all subjects read, under supervision, 30 words representative of the words they would later encounter in the stories. The procedure used to select the words was developed by Calfee and Calfee (1980). Because the scores in this decoding test were high, none of the students tested had to be disqualified from the study.

Materials The materials consisted of two series of

five stories each. (See Appendix A.) Each story was eight pages long and approximately 130 words in length. From three of the stories in each series a portion of the story was purposefully omitted to render the stories internally inconsistent. The other two stories were left intact and consistent. In a pilot study, all 10 adult expert readers, 5 reading each series, detected the intended inconsistencies in the three problematic stories. With each of the two series, the order of administra- tion of the stories was the same: inconsistent, consistent, inconsistent, consistent, inconsistent.

Several things were done to make the consistent and inconsistent stories comparable. All stories were written at the second-grade readability level. The formula used (Bur- meister, 1978) called for 100 words to be selected from each passage (an entire story in one instance). Average word length was then plotted against average sentence length in

order to determine readability level. Corre- sponding pages in each story had the same number of syllables. Only simple sentence structures were used, and each story followed the same story grammar format developed by Stein and Trabasso (in press). On the first page the protagonists and social/physical environment were introduced (the so-called setting). Each of the following pages corresponded to an element in the realization of the goal: initiating event, internal response, attempt, obstacle, solution or reaction, consequence, and reaction. The only difference between the inconsistent and consistent stories was that the former contained only reactions to the obstacle rather than an effective way of dealing with it (solution).

A second series of stories was formed by: (a) converting the first two inconsistent stories in the first series into consistent stories, accomplished by changing the reaction to the obstacle (page 6 of the inconsistent story) into a sensible solution (page 6 of the consistent story); (b) changing the two consistent stories in the first series into inconsistent stories by reversing the procedure just described. Half of the subject pairs read the first series and the other half read the second series. Alternate pairs of subjects (beginning with those who had the lowest intelligence scores) were assigned to each series so that each group would have the same mean IQ score and there would not be an interaction between group IQ and series. Two series were used so that the results would not be attributable to story effects.

Children read stories on a Commodore microcomputer so that reading times and lookbacks could be automatically and pre- cisely recorded. The pages of each story appeared one at a time. By pressing a button the child would advance to the next page and by pressing another, back up to a previous page.

Design The experiment was designed to assess

differences between skilled and less skilled readers, matched on intelligence, in gist recall and comprehension monitoring. The latter

42 READING RESEARCH QUARTERLY * Fall 1984 XX/1


was assessed by two on-line measures and by verbal report. The two on-line measures consisted of: (a) the time it took to read the two pages following the built-in inconsistencies as compared to the time it took to read the equivalent portions of the consistent stories, and (b) the difference in the number of lookbacks in the two kinds of stories. As to verbal report, after reading each story the subjects were asked if they thought the story was inconsistent. If they thought it was, they were also asked to locate the inconsistency, explain why they thought the story was inconsistent, and indicate what they would say to fix the story.

Another objective of the study was to investigate the relationship between verbal report of problem detection and (a) gist story recall, and (b) on-line measures of problem detection.

Procedure After all the preliminary testing was done

(i.e., Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills, Coloured Test of Progressive Matrices, De- coding Test), the children were tested individ- ually in a session that lasted about 30 minutes per subject. The sessions were tape recorded and eventually transcribed.

The procedure consisted of a first pass through the five stories (initial reading) followed by a review of the same five stories:

1. The children were told that they would be reading five stories and that "some of the stories might have a page missing" and that "this would mean that a piece of the story had been left out." They were told that they would be reading each story to themselves after which they would be asked if they thought a page was missing.

2. The subjects were taught how to read the stories on the computer, how to advance the pages, and how to back up. They were specifically told that going back a page was just like rereading a page in a book. After practicing the page-turning procedure, they had to follow the investigator's instructions correctly-seven commands to advance or back-up-before they were allowed to read the experimental stories.

3. After reading each story to themselves, the subjects were asked to recall it in their own words. They were then asked if they thought a page was missing in the story.

4. If they thought a page was indeed missing, the subjects were handed the story on eight 3 x 5 in. (7.62 x 12.70 cm) cards (each card corresponding to a page on the computer's screen) and asked where they would place the missing page, why they thought a page was missing, and what they thought the missing page would have to say in order to fix the story.

5. If the subjects concluded that no page was missing, they were simply asked to go on to the next story.

6. The fifth story was read aloud first from the index cards and then again on the computer. Here again, the children were asked if they thought a page was missing and the procedure outlined under 4 and 5 was then followed.

7. During the review each child was probed. Beginning with the first story, they were all asked to reread pages 5, 6, and 7 (i.e., the obstacle, reaction or solution, and consequence pages) from the computer screen "just so that the experimenter would be sure that she got everything right." Having read the three pages, the subjects were asked to recall what they had just read. The experimenter then said that "some kids think there is a page missing somewhere between these three pages: What do you think?"

8. If they thought that a page was missing, they were again asked the three questions in 4 above.

9. If a subject thought that no page was missing, he or she would be confronted directly with the inconsistency (i.e., If David's car stopped, how was he able to win the race?). A list of these probes can be found in Appendix B.

Coding Instrument and Interjudge Reliability

A coding instrument was developed to quantify target information from the transcripts of the experimental sessions. In order to assess interjudge reliability: (a) a primary



judge coded all 32 transcripts; (b) a subset of eight transcripts, half of skilled and half of less skilled readers, was randomly selected and scored by an informed reliability judge; (c) for each coding category, the percentage of interjudge agreement between the primary judge and the informed reliability judge was computed. For each category, this was done by computing how frequently across 8 subjects, three tasks per subject, the two coders agreed exactly. Interjudge agreement ranged from .83 to 1.00.

Results

Differences between skilled and less skilled readers in verbal report of problem detection and the explanation for these differences were the central issues of the study.

Initial Reading Verbal report of problem detection was

assessed by the children's answers to four questions asked after each story. Each question corresponded to a dependent measure: (a) "Do you think a page is missing?" (missing page detection); (b) "Where would you put the missing page?" (missing page placement); (c) "Why do you think a page is missing?" (explanation of the problem); (d) "If you were going to fix the story, what would you make the missing page say?" (booklet repair). A score of 1 was given for each correct response. For each subject a composite verbal report of problem detection score for each dependent measure was formed

by averaging scores for the three inconsistent stories. The average composite scores can be found in Table 1, T-tests were used to compare problem detection for the two groups across all three inconsistent stories. Significant group differences favoring the skilled readers were found for the dependent measures: missing page detection, t(30) = 2.84, p

Table 2 Average composite recall scores of skilled and less skilled readers

Skilled Readers Less Skilled Readers

Stories M SD M SD

Initial 1.73 .30 1.60 .39 Review 1.83 .21 1.69 .28

group differences. It does not appear to be the case, therefore, that differences in story recall could account for differences in verbal report of problem detection.

Three indices were used to find out if children were detecting the problem at some level but not reporting it. Two were on-line measures of problem detection and the third was a measure that indicated whether children were inferring information to make the story consistent. The first on-line measure was a rank-order reading score. Children received a score of from 0-4 depending on how often their reading time on page 7 and 8 of the inconsistent stories (excluding the fifth story) was greater than their reading time of pages 7 and 8 of the consistent stories. A score of 4 indicated that they had longer reading times on pages 7 and 8 of both inconsistent stories. Other scores corresponded to the following rank orders (with reading times increasing from left to right)-consistent, inconsistent, consistent, inconsistent = 3; consistent, inconsistent, inconsistent, consistent = 2; inconsistent, consistent, consistent, inconsistent = 2; inconsistent, consistent, inconsistent, consistent = 1; inconsistent, inconsistent, consistent, consistent = 0. Average group scores are presented in Table 3 where it can be seen that skilled readers spent more time on the

Table 3 Average reading time rank order scores of skilled and less skilled readers


Stories M SD M SD

Initial 3.25 1.00 2.25 1.24

inconsistent stories than less skilled readers. A t-test comparing skilled and less skilled readers revealed significant differences favoring skilled readers, t(30) = 2.51, p

going in the expected direction), these differences approach significance for Story 1 (vX'2 =1.46, p = .07) and are significant for Story 3 (I/? = 1.89, p = .03). For Stories 1 and 3 combined, less skilled readers who showed signs of minimal detection reported a problem 30% of the time while the skilled readers who showed these signs reported a problem 89% of the time.

Table 4 Problem reporting of skilled and less skilled readers showing minimal signs of problem detection


Story # Report No Report Report No Report

Onea 9 6 3 7 Threeb 10 5 4 9

"p = .07. bp = .03.

Review Parallel analyses were also made of the

data collected when the children reread three pages of the stories and were probed (the review). Across the three inconsistent stories, t-tests revealed significant group differences in missing page detection, t(30) = 2.99,p

Although less skilled readers reported the problem much less frequently, the reasons for the lack of problem reporting for Stories 1 and 3 appear to be the same for both skilled and less skilled readers. In both groups, all in all, inferring accounts for more failure to report the missing page than any other variable-62% of the instances of no report of the less skilled readers and 55% of the instances of no report of the skilled readers. Our belief is that inferring that is not marked as hypothetical by the children may lead them to believe that a message is consistent. In 25% of the instances of no report for the skilled readers and 9% of those for the less skilled readers, the children did not remember all the information needed to create the inconsistency. They may have forgotten the problematic material and perhaps the problem itself at the time when they had to decide whether the message was problematic. Twelve percent of the instances of no report of the skilled readers cannot be explained by our data. These children indicated by lookbacks and by longer reading times that they were detecting the problem in some sense, at some level. They were not making inferences to fill in missing information, thus making the message consistent. They had perfect recall of the information crucial to creating the inconsistency. As noted in the introduction, Capelli (1982) suggests possible explanations for this phenomenon.

In the introduction two views of why some readers demonstrate little comprehension monitoring were presented. Essentially, these views are that these readers do not sufficiently integrate the text material to detect problems or they do integrate and construct information in text, but do not report detection. There appears to be a subset of less skilled readers who do not sufficiently integrate text material and so do not report a problem with the text. Evic' mnce of this is that less skilled readers tend to slow down less at the inconsistency than skilled readers. How- ever, this does not explain all of their failure to report the problem. Both the less skilled readers who do show minimal detection as evidenced by either longer reading time or lookbacks at the inconsistency and/ or infer-

ring and do not report a problem, as well as their skilled counterparts, corroborate the findings of those investigators who contend that children process information in a constructive fashion but that this processing does not result in conscious awareness of noncomprehension.

The results of this study suggest four possible implications for education.

1. A child's ability to recall a text does not necessarily imply that the text has been fully understood. In three of the stories (1, 3, and Review 3) there was no relationship between gist recall of information and verbal report of problem detection: As many children remembered all the crucial information without detecting the missing page (12 in Story 1, 8 in Story 3, 12 in Review Story 3) as remembered all the information and did detect it (11 in Story 1, 10 in Story 3, 12 in Review Story 3). These findings suggest that remembering the pertinent information is not necessarily indicative of text comprehension. This suggests that teaching strategies that rely solely on recall questions as indicators of student comprehension may not provide the teacher with sufficient information about the student's reading abilities. Teachers should be trained to use a variety of assessment techniques to find out if a student has fully understood the text.

2. Children, especially those who are less skilled, may engage in constructive processing without reporting a problem in the text. In the present study, one-half of the children in each group who made inferences to fill in the perceived gaps did not report a problem. Activities such as giving children practice in discovering missing information in problematic messages, having them generate inconsistent messages and then make them nonprob- lematic, and helping them distinguish between inconsistencies that are resolved by the text and those that are not might help prevent children from making unwarranted inferences and then forgetting they have done so. Because other possible causes of poor comprehension monitoring are children's insensitivity to such cues as a slow-down in reading rate, and/or a greater expenditure of effort, or their failure to use these cues as an



indication of a problematic message, children trained to be aware of these feelings may well become better comprehension monitors. They could be given obviously inconsistent passages to read, passages that cause a "jolt," and asked to tell why the passage was inconsistent and how they felt when reading it. Slowly decreasing the magnitude of these feelings of noncomprehension by making the inconsistency less obvious might help sensitize children to the problem.

3. Probing questions do not necessarily impel a student to question the adequacy of a message. The probes helped the more intelli- gent children rather than the skilled or less skilled, as evidenced by the significant corre- lation between problem reporting and intelligence on the review data. This implication is particularly noteworthy if one educational goal is to foster critical analysis of textual understanding of reading material. More explicit instruction may be necessary to foster adequate comprehension or comprehension monitoring.

4. Teachers would be well advised to assume that children who score at or above grade level on standardized comprehension tests still need instruction in comprehension monitoring. Although there were certainly differences in comprehension monitoring between our skilled and less skilled readers, the skilled readers were not at ceiling on our tasks. This was true in spite of the fact that the stories were well below grade level and obviously flawed, and that there were no subtle distinctions or complex relationships such as those that exist in some school texts.

REFERENCES AUGUST, D.L. (1981). Individual differences in the com-

prehension monitoring of inconsistencies in text. Unpublished manuscript, Stanford University.

BAKER, L. (1979). Comprehension monitoring: Identify- ing and coping with text confusions. Journal of Reading Behavior, 11, 363-374.

BURMEISTER, L.A. (1978). Reading strategies for middle and secondary school teachers. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

CALFEE, R.C., & CALFEE, K.H. (1980). Reading, reading acquisition. Prepared for the Course Team, Deacon University Open Campus Program, School of

Education, Maryborough, Victoria, Australia: Hedges & Bell Pty. Ltd.

CANNEY, G., & WINOGRAD, P. (1979, April). Schematic for reading and reading comprehension performance. (Tech. Rep. No. 120). Urbana: University of Illinois, Center for the Study of Reading. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 169 520)

CAPELLI, C.A. (1982). Factors affecting children's ability to evaluate their comprehension. Unpublished manuscript, Stanford University.

CAPELLI, C.A., & MARKMAN, E.M. (1981). Children s sensi- tivity to incomprehensive material in written text. Unpublished manuscript, Stanford University.

COMPREHENSIVE TEST OF BASIC SKILLS, LEVEL 2, FORM S. (1973). Monterey, CA: CTB/ McGraw-Hill.

FLAVELL, J.H., SPEER, J.R., GREEN, F.L., & AUGUST, D.L. (198 1). The development of comprehension monitoring and knowledge about communication. Mono- graphs of the Society for Reseach in Child Develop- ment, 46(4, Serial No. 191).

GARNER, R. (1981). Monitoring of passage inconsistency among poor comprehenders: A preliminary test of the "piecemeal processing" explanation. Journal of Educational Research, 74, 159-162.

GARNER, R., & ANDERSON, J. (1982). Monitoring-of- understanding research: Inquiry directions, method- ological dilemmas. Journal of Experimental Educa- tion, 50, 70-76.

HARRIS, P.L., KRUITHOF, A., TERWOGT, M.M., & VISSER, T. (1981). Children's detection of awareness of textual anomaly. Journalof Experimental Child Psychology, 31, 212-230.

IRONSMITH, M., & WHITEHURST, G.J. (1978). The development of listener abilities in communication: How children deal with ambiguous information. Child Development, 49, 348-352.

MARKMAN, E.M. (1977). Realizing that you don't understand: A preliminary investigation. Child Develop- ment, 48, 986-992.

MARKMAN, E.M. (1979). Realizing that you don't understand: Elementary school children's awareness of inconsistencies. Child Development, 50, 643-655.

NISBETT, R.E., & WILSON, T.D. (1977). Telling more than we know: Verbal reports of mental processes. Psychological Review, 34, 231-259.

PATTERSON, C.J., COSGROVE, J.M., & O'BRIEN, R.G. (1980). Non-verbal indicants of comprehension and noncomprehension in children. Developmental Psychology, 16, 38-48.

RAVEN, J.C. (1962). Coloured Progressive Matrices (Sets A, Ab, B). London: H.K. Lewis & Co.

STEIN, N.L., & TRABASSO, T. (in press). What's in a story: An approach to comprehension and instruction. In R. Glaser (Ed.), Advances in the psychology of instruction (Vol. 2). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

WINOGRAD, P., & JOHNSON, P. (1980, January). Compre- hension monitoring and the error detection paradigm (Tech. Rep. No. 153). Urbana: University of Illinois, Center for the Study of Reading. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 181 425)



Footnote The research reported herein was supported in part by

the National Institute of Education under Contract No. US-NIE-G-81-0116. This report does not necessarily represent the opinion of NIE or the U.S. Department of Education.

APPENDIXES Appendix A: Stories Series #1: Story 1 Kate lived with her parents in a house by the railroad tracks. Kate's father worked for the railroad. One day a terrible storm caused a flood. The flood washed away the wooden train bridge near Kate's house. Kate knew that she would have to stop the train before it got to the bridge. She decided to run to the tracks to warn the engineer. Kate grabbed a flashlight. She ran toward the tracks. She was about five hundred yards away from the railroad tracks. Then she fell down hard. She hurt her left leg. Kate was worried. She knew that someone had to stop the train before it got to the bridge. The train stopped safely before the bridge. Kate was very glad that she had helped. The railroad gave her a medal for saving the train.

Series #1: Story 2 David was a race car driver. He drove a red car with big bold stripes. One day he decided to enter a race. The winner of the race would be famous. He wanted to win. He knew that he would have to drive faster than he had ever driven before. On the day of the race David drove as fast as he could. He stayed on the inside track. David was winning the race. All of a sudden his engine began to lose power. His car began to slow down. It stopped. Then David saw he was out of gas. He put more gas in the tank and the car started. David came in first and the crowd went wild. David was so proud that he had won his first big race. He received a beautiful gold trophy.

Setting

Initiating Event

Internal Response

Attempt

Obstacle

Reaction

Consequence Reaction

Setting

Initiating Event

Internal Response

Attempt

Obstacle

Solution

Consequence

Reaction



Series #1: Story 3 Annie was sitting by the window watching the rain. It had been raining for two weeks. All of a sudden the dam near the town burst. Cars and trucks were swept away by the water. Annie knew that she had to get out of the house. She decided to climb up onto her roof. She opened the window. She stood on the wet window ledge. Annie began to pull herself up to the roof. She lost her balance and then she slipped. She fell straight toward the cold water. Annie knew that she was in great danger. She hoped that she could save herself from drowning. Annie was safe on top of the high roof. Annie was very happy that she had made it. She knew soon she would be dry and warm again.

Series #1: Story 4 Allen and Mary lived in Japan. They owned a boat. Their mother was going to have a birthday soon. She would have a big surprise party. They wanted to get her a wonderful present. They decided to look for a black pearl. They took their boat to a quiet spot. They lowered themselves into the water. They began to open oyster shells to find black pearls. Inside a large oyster Allen found the pearl. Suddenly a large octopus grabbed his foot. Allen struggled to get free.

Mary turned and saw Allen's problem. She struck the octopus and it let him go. They floated to the surface with the pearl. They were happy about finding the pearl. Their mother would be very excited with her gift.

Series #1: Story 5 Rod and Steve were good friends. They climbed mountains together. They decided to climb a very dangerous mountain. They would be the first Americans to climb the mountain.

Setting

Initiating Event

Internal Response

Attempt

Obstacle

Reaction

Consequence

Reaction

Setting

Initiating Event

Internal Response

Attempt

Obstacle

Solution

Consequence

Reaction

Setting

Initiating Event



They wanted to get to the top of the mountain safely. They only packed the best mountain climbing tools. On the mountain Rod climbed first. Sometimes he pulled Steve up steep ledges by a rope. They were near the mountain top. Steve was holding onto the rope. Suddenly the rope broke. Steve began to slide down the mountain. Steve was very much afraid. He hoped that somehow Rod would be able to help him. They continued climbing toward the top. When they reached the top the men were happy. They stuck a flag in the ground to prove they made it.

Internal Response

Attempt

Obstacle

Reaction


Series #2: Story 1 David was a race car driver. He drove a red car with big bold stripes. One day he decided to enter a race. The winner of the race would be famous. He wanted to win. He knew that he would have to drive faster than he had ever driven before. On the day of the race David drove as fast as he could. He stayed on the inside track. David was winning the race. All of a sudden his engine began to lose power. His car began to slow down. It stopped. David knew he had to work fast. He knew if he did not hurry he would lose the race. David came in first and the crowd went wild. David was so proud that he had won his first big race. He received a beautiful gold trophy.

Setting

Initiating Event

Internal Response

Attempt

Obstacle

Reaction

Consequence

Reaction

Series #2: Story 2 Kate lived with her parents in a house by the railroad tracks. Kate's father worked for the railroad. One day a terrible storm caused a flood. The flood washed away the wooden train bridge near Kate's house. Kate knew that she would have to stop the train before it got to the bridge. She decided to run to the tracks to warn the engineer. Kate grabbed a flashlight. She ran toward the tracks. She was about five hundred yards away from the railroad tracks. Then she fell down hard. She hurt her left leg.

Setting

Initiating Event

Internal Response

Attempt

Obstacle



Kate grabbed the flashlight and she began to blink danger. The engineer saw the light. The train stopped safely before the bridge. Kate was very glad that she had helped. The railroad gave her a medal for saving the train.

Solution


Series #2: Story 3 Allen and Mary lived in Japan. They owned a boat. Their mother was going to have a birthday soon. She would have a big surprise party. They wanted to get her a wonderful present. They decided to look for a black pearl. They took their boat to a quiet spot. They lowered themselves into the water. They began to open oyster shells to find black pearls. Inside a large oyster Allen found the pearl. Suddenly a large octopus grabbed his foot. Allen struggled to get free. Allen knew he couldn't call for help. He knew Mary could not hear him underwater.

They floated to the surface with the pearl. They were happy about finding the pearl. Their mother would be very excited with her gift.

Setting

Initiating Event

Internal Response

Attempt

Obstacle

Reaction


Series #2: Story 4 Annie was sitting by the window watching the rain. It had been raining for two weeks. All of a sudden the dam near the town burst. Cars and trucks were swept away by the water. Annie knew that she had to get out of the house. She decided to climb up onto her roof. She opened the window. She stood on the wet window ledge. Annie began to pull herself up to the roof. She lost her balance and then she slipped. She fell straight towards the cold water. She landed on the balcony below and began to climb up to the roof again. Annie was safe on top of the high roof. Annie was very happy that she had made it. She knew soon she would be dry and warm again.

Setting

Initiating Event

Internal Response

Attempt

Obstacle

Solution

Consequence

Reaction



Series #2: Story 5 Rod and Steve were good friends. They climbed mountains together. They decided to climb a very dangerous mountain. They would be the first Americans to climb the mountain. They wanted to get to the top of the mountain safely. They only packed the best mountain climbing tools. On the mountain Rod climbed first. Sometimes he pulled Steve up steep ledges by a rope. They were near the mountain top. Steve was holding onto the rope. Suddenly the rope broke. Steve began to slide down the mountain. Steve was very much afraid. He hoped that somehow Rod would be able to help him. They continued climbing toward the top. When they reached the top the men were happy. They stuck a flag in the ground to prove they made it.

Setting

Initiating Event

Internal Response

Attempt

Obstacle

Reaction


Appendix B: Probes Series #1 Kate fell and hurt her leg. How was she able to help stop the train? David's car stopped. How was he able to win the race? Annie slipped and fell towards the water. How did she get up onto the roof? Allen was grabbed by an octopus. How did he get to the surface? Steve began to slide down the mountain. How did he get to the top? Series #2 David's car stopped. How was he able to win the race? Kate fell and hurt her leg. How was she able to stop the train? Allen was grabbed by an octopus. How did he get to the surface? Annie slipped and fell towards the water. How did she get up onto the roof? Steve began to slide down the mountain. How did he get to the top?



Article Contentsp. 39p. 40p. 41p. 42p. 43p. 44p. 45p. 46p. 47p. 48p. 49p. 50p. 51p. 52p. 53

Issue Table of ContentsReading Research Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 1-128Front Matter [pp. 1-5]The Reading Group: An Experimental Investigation of a Labyrinth [pp. 6-38]Comparison of Comprehension Monitoring of Skilled and Less Skilled Readers [pp. 39-53]The Effects of Sentence Context in Good and Poor Readers: A Test of Stanovich's Interactive-Compensatory Model [pp. 54-61]Direct Instruction of Summarization Skills [pp. 62-78]Effective Reading Programs: A Critical Review of Outlier Studies [pp. 79-92]The Effectiveness of a Direct Instruction Paradigm for Teaching Main Idea Comprehension [pp. 93-115]Letters to the EditorsResponse to Cloer (1984) [p. 116]Rasinski Comments on O'Shea and Sindelar [pp. 116-117]Duffelmeyer Comments on Carnine, Kameenui, and Coyle [pp. 117-118]Comments on Improving the Comprehensibility of Stories [pp. 118-119]A Reply to Professor Gersten [p. 119]

Back Matter [pp. 120-128]

comp. monitoring 1984 kd 24-06-15

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