Strategic processing during comprehension.

Abstract

This study addresses 3 questions: How flexible are readers when reading strategically? How is strategic processing affected by properties of the text? and Do some strategies lead to better text retention than others? Participants read short narratives and thought aloud with an instruction to either explain, predict, associate, or understand. The think-aloud protocols were used to predict sentence reading times for other participants who read silently with the same strategies. The results indicated that readers are capable of strategically controlling the inferences that they generate. However, strategic control comes at some cost in that it limits the resources devoted to other inferences. Furthermore, strategic processing is heavily constrained by a text. Text-based explanations occurred when there was an identifiable causal antecedent in the prior text. Knowledge-based inferences occurred when there were no antecedents and when new characters and objects were introduced. These effects occurred across reading strategies. Reading to explain led to better memory, but only when reading silently.

Thinking Aloud in Expository Text: Processes and Outcomes

“…Researchers interested in how students understood narrative text structures (Stein & Glenn, 1979) examined recall using the elements of story (i.e., character, setting, goal, problem, events, and resolution). Other researchers interested in causal connections among segments of text broke sentences into clauses consisting of a main verb (Kendeou & van den Broek, 2005;Magliano, Trabasso, & Graesser, 1999;van den Broek, Lorch, Linderholm, & Gustafson, 2001). …”

“…The majority of inferences were generated using world knowledge as opposed to text information. Using the same coding system, Magliano, Trabasso, and Graesser (1999) examined the generation of thinkalouds as a function of specific instructions to explain, associate, predict, or understand a narrative. Such instructions significantly influenced the types of inferences produced with the number of explanations significantly related to recall.…”

Inference making while reading narrative and expository texts: an ERP study

“…The act of inferencing is paramount for text comprehension because it makes possible for readers to establish a representation of the meaning of the text in memory on the basis of its coherence relations and the readers' general knowledge (Gernsbacher, 1990(Gernsbacher, , 1997Halldorson & Singer, 2002;Linderholm, 2002;Long, Oppy, & Seely, 1997;Magliano, Trabasso, & Graesser, 1999;Noordmann & Vonk, 1992;Trabasso & Magliano, 1996;van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). Hence, if readers fail to execute processes that integrate different portions of a text and to make inferences based on their general knowledge to elaborate on the text representation, they may fail to understand the text and have diffi culties in remembering it (Horiba, 2000;Linderholm & van den Broek, 2002;Long et al, 1997;Trabasso & Suh, 1993;Trabasso, Suh, Payton, & Jain, 1995).…”

“…Inference generation studies that used the narrative type of text as stimulus, i.e., stories with beginning, middle and end, character(s), plot and setting, abound in the literature (Beeman, 1993;Lehman-Blake & Tompkins, 2001;Magliano et al, 1999;Mason & Just, 2004;Singer, Andrusiak, Reisorf, & Black, 1992;Trabasso & Magliano, 1996;Virtue, Haberman, Clancy, Parrish, & Beeman, 2006, among others). Little is known about the process of inference making in expository texts, i.e., a unifi ed piece of writing aiming at presenting information in a logical sequence relation of facts (Winter, 1994).…”

Read&Answer, A Tool to Capture on-Line Processing of Electronic Texts

“…To our interest is the growing use of this methodology to study general comprehension processes and strategies that students apply when reading texts, validating that the content of think-aloud protocols is linked to comprehension [16][17][18][19] Moreover, not only has this methodology been used to study on-line processing of one text, but it has also been used in classical and recent studies of multiple text comprehension and integration processes from multiple perspectives [20][21][22] Using a think-aloud procedure would provide very valuable data on processes and strategies that occur during comprehension, and the validity of these data would be increased if convergence with other kind of data were provided, such as on-line time measurements [23] Indeed, successful attempts have been done to provide converging evidence for the conclusions drawn from protocol data [24][25][26] Additionally, using the think-aloud methodology as only a part of a converging evidence strategy has been presented in Magliano and Graesser's [27] three-pronged approach to comprehension research.…”