Children's Ability to Use Three Standards to Evaluate Their Comprehension of Text

Abstract

THIS STUDY examined the ability of children in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades to evaluate their comprehension of text using three standards. The authors measured children's ability to detect nonsense words, which requires use of a lexical standard; their ability to detect falsehoods (violations of prior knowledge), which requires a standard of external consistency; and their ability to detect inconsistencies, which requires a standard of internal consistency. Children's age, reading ability, and the kind of instructions they were given all affected their comprehension evaluation performance. Children more often used the standards of lexical and external consistency, which required integration of the information in the text with prior knowledge (either vocabulary knowledge or factual knowledge), than the standard of internal consistency of the text. Different developmental and reading ability patterns were found for the three standards. The authors also included several commonly used verbal report measures, but the results from most of these measures were inconsistent with the results of the performance measure. The authors suggest that results from verbal reports should be interpreted with caution.