Comprehension strategy training in content areas

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to present the results of two studies developed to test the effectiveness of teaching different strategies for identifying important information in the context of ordinary instruction. Training in both studies can be characterised as metacognitively oriented and contextualised in content areas. Also, the same strategies have been the object of training in both cases, Previous knowledge activation and diagrammatic representation of relations among text ideas were among the main strategies trained. 31 subjects (11 to 12 years-old) participated in the first study, and 104 (11 to 14 years-old) in the second one, In both cases, subjects were divided into ttl-O groups, experimental and control. Assessment was made through an interview carried out separately with two texts, Results reached statistical significance mainly in study 2, but only for students in higher grades. These results show the effectiveness of the kind of training developed and the importance oftaking into account the developmental and/or academic level of students in order to determinate when to introduce strategy training.The mai n objective of this paper is to present the results of two studies developed to test the effectiveness of teaching different strategies for identifying important information in the context of ordinary instruction.Two lines of inquiry have served as the theoretical framework for these studies: research on instruction related to important information identification and literature about expertsnovices differences.Concerning the former, research on instruction related to important information identification -mainly based on the model of van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) -has underlined that the process of determining main ideas when reading a text is influenced by some important variables, such as previous knowledge, knowledge of text structure and application of macrorules (generalization, suppression and construction-integration). Since, in this process, some kind of failures may occur, research on instruction has been centered on the training of some of these variables in order to correct the faults.

PROTOCOL: Problem solving before instruction (PS‐I) to promote learning and motivation in child and adult students

“…In these latter control conditions, students start by exploring information at their own pace, which, similarly to PS-I, gives them the opportunity to activate prior knowledge before receiving explanations from the professor. As we have previously described, activation of prior knowledge can potentially favour the assimilation of explanations (Carriedo, 1995;Smith, 1992;Sweller, 2019). This pattern of results would be in line with the results of Newman, 2019, in which the advantage of PS-I in terms of learning was higher when compared against the introduction of concepts with a lecture, rather than when PS-I was compared against interventions that introduced concepts with worked-examples or problems with content guidance.…”

Assessment for learning: Science teachers' ideas on assessment of core competences in science understanding

“…It happens often that readers meet unknown words. However, if they are able to deduce their meaning from textual context, the comprehension process is not obstructed (Sternberg and Powell, 1983 Therefore, text comprehension assessment should try to identify the kind of propositional representations that students build as a result of their inferential activity, as well as the factors that determine comprehension difficulties at this level -the syntactic and semantic clues that are not taken into account due to a lack of previous knowledge or of adequate reading strategies -for example, lack of identification of antecedents and consequents-, factors that have been identified and described in different studies (Carriedo and Alonso-Tapia, 1995).…”

Compreensão de leitura em alunos de sétima e oitava séries do ensino fundamental

“…Do contrário, a compreensão é muito dificultada, pois o leitor não consegue associar os conteúdos lidos aos conhecimentos já aprendidos e entender a nova informação (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978;Otto, 1992;Carriedo & Alonso-Tapia, 1995). É fundamental que os estudantes sejam expostos a estímulos adequados que promovam o interesse pela leitura, desde cedo.…”