Rating the Importance of Structural Units of Prose Passages: A Problem of Metacognitive Development

Brown, Ann L.; Smiley, Sandra S.

doi:10.2307/1128873

Cited by 415 publications

(193 citation statements)

References 13 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

170

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…This suggestion is consistent with research showing that children's ability to judge thematic importance is also late developing (e.g., Brown & Smiley, 1977). Nevertheless, we know that from a very early age, children are sensitive to syntactic form class and use it as a cue to a word's meaning (e.g., Gelman & Markman, 1985).…”

supporting

confidence: 89%

Developmental Change in Readers' Responses to Unknown Words

Baker

1989

Journal of Reading Behavior

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Two experiments examined factors affecting the likelihood that readers will recognize failures of word comprehension and the basis by which they judge the disruptiveness of an unknown word to sentence comprehension. In Experiment 1, third-and fifth-grade skilled and less skilled readers read and evaluated the comprehensibility of short paragraphs containing nonwords varying in number of syllables (1 vs. 3) and syntactic form class (noun vs. adjective). Third graders were more likely to identify the longer nonwords as problematic than the shorter nonwords, but the fifth graders were not influenced by word length. Fifth graders were somewhat more sensitive to the greater disruption in comprehensibility caused by unknown nouns relative to unknown adjectives. In a second task in Experiment 1, and in Experiment 2 (which included adults as well as third-and fifth-grade average readers), subjects evaluated the relative comprehensibility of pairs of sentences in which the nonwords contrasted in number of syllables, syntactic class or both. Whereas the younger readers were more likely to focus on word length in their judgments of comprehensibility, the older readers were more likely to focus on meaning. The results have implications for research and instruction in comprehension monitoring and vocabulary acquisition.

show abstract

supporting

confidence: 89%

Developmental Change in Readers' Responses to Unknown Words

Baker

1989

Journal of Reading Behavior

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The stories were divided into idea units following a procedure used by Johnson (1970) and Brown and Smiley (1977). Independent groups of between 19 and 27 college students were asked to read two of the stories (randomly selected) thoroughly and then to divide the text into individual units; an individual unit was defined as one that represented a self-contained idea.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Development of Plans for Summarizing Texts

Brown¹,

Day²,

Jones³

1983

Child Development

Self Cite

185

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Students from fifth, seventh and eleventh grade, together with college students wrote constrained and unconstrained summaries of stories they had previously learned to criterion. College and older high school students outperformed younger students in their propensity to plan ahead by making rough drafts, in their sensitivity to fine gradations of importance, and in their ability to condense more idea units into the same number of words.The few younger students who planned adequately performed at a level set by college students. Planning, not age per se, was the best predictor of efficiency, although the propensity to plan and age were highly correlated.Under circumstances where summary production is not just the result of "automatic" retention, the ability to work recursively on information to render it as succinctly as possible requires judgment and effort, knowledge and strategies, and is, therefore, late developing.

show abstract

“…Do poor readers differ in a systematic manner from good readers in what they consider important in texts? This is an important question because, to paraphrase Brown and Smiley (1977), judgments of importance could differ because the poor readers have a different conception of what is important or because they lack sensitivity to importance. The relationship between sensitivity to importance and reading comprehension performance is also unresolved.…”

Section: Strategic Difficultiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strategic Difficulties in Summarizing Texts

Winograd

1984

Reading Research Quarterly

230

121

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Strategic Difficulties in Summarizing TextsThis study examined the possibility that some eighth-graders' difficulties with the task of summarization may be linked to deficits in strategic skills. A systematic examination was made of the students' introspective awareness of the summarization task, ability to identify important elements in the text, and ability to transform the text into its gist.Results indicated that most of the eighth graders were aware of the task demands of summarization. However, good and poor readers did differ in what they considered important, in what they included in their summaries, and in how they transformed the original text. Sensitivity to importance and efficient use of the transformations were significantly related to the ability to produce summaries. Sensitivity to importance was also significantly related to the ability to comprehend what had been read. The study suggests that when comprehension difficulties are encountered, teachers should assess the students' use of strategic skills and provide appropriate training if necessary.In the past few years researchers have begun to learn more about the higher-order comprehension problems that may contribute to some children's frustration with reading. The phrase "higher-order" refers to those problems that are not caused by inadequate decoding skills or problems in lexical access (Golinkoff, 1975-76). Recent research has emphasized a number of possible sources of such difficulties including those that may be related to differential language experiences, the lack of prior knowledge, or the lack of strategic skills (Collins & Haviland, 1979).It is the third possibility, a lack of strategic skills, which was the focus of this study.The purpose of this study was to systematically examine the strategy differences between good and poor readers as they summarized what they had read. Three aspects of the use of strategies were of particular interest:(a) the awareness of the task demands involved in producing summaries, (b) the ability to identify important elements in the text, and (c) the ability to transform and reduce the full meaning of a text into its gist.These aspects provided the basis for three experimental hypotheses about why poor readers might have difficulty in producing adequate summaries: 0l) Poor readers are not aware that the purpose of summarizing is to convey the important ideas in a concise manner.(2) Poor readers fail to identify the information which should, by adult standards, be included in a summary. (3)Poor readers fail to use, or use ineffectively, those transformations used by their more fluent peers. Abstract Strategic Difficulties Strategic DifficultiesFor each of these hypotheses there were three goals: (a) to identify and characterize possible strategy deficits evidenced by poor readers, (b) to examine the influence that such deficits might have on the ability to perform the task of summarizing, and (c) to examine the influence that such deficits might have on the ability to comprehend what has been read, in o...

show abstract

Rating the Importance of Structural Units of Prose Passages: A Problem of Metacognitive Development

Cited by 415 publications

References 13 publications

Developmental Change in Readers' Responses to Unknown Words

Developmental Change in Readers' Responses to Unknown Words

The Development of Plans for Summarizing Texts

Strategic Difficulties in Summarizing Texts

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About