Children's Comprehension Monitoring Research Articles

The Relations Between Children's Comprehension Monitoring and Their Reading Comprehension and Vocabulary Knowledge: An Eye-Movement Study.

Poor reading comprehension may be due to having ineffective comprehension monitoring, the metacognitive process of evaluating and regulating comprehension. When comprehension breaks down due to an inconsistency either at the word-level (e.g., due to an unfamiliar word) or at the sentence-level (e.g., due to contradictory information), readers may identify the misunderstanding and take steps to regulate their comprehension. In the current study, we utilized two eye-movement tasks (one newly developed) to examine comprehension monitoring in third through fifth grade students (n = 123), when confronted with word- and sentence-level inconsistencies, by measuring the amount of time they read (gaze duration) and reread the target inconsistent words. We investigated how this skill may be associated with individual differences in age, reading comprehension ability, and vocabulary knowledge. The results showed that generally, all students detected the word-level inconsistencies, indicated by longer gaze durations, and attempted to regulate their comprehension after detecting both word- and sentence-level inconsistencies, as indicated by more time spent rereading. Students with stronger reading comprehension (when controlling for their vocabulary), and stronger vocabulary knowledge (when controlling for their reading comprehension) were more likely to attempt regulating their comprehension. In general, the difference between the control words and the inconsistent words was smaller for third graders and larger for fourth and fifth graders, which we argue indicates greater levels of comprehension monitoring - specifically employing repair strategies. With eye-tracking technology becoming more accessible, these tasks may be useful in assessing children's reading processes to better understand at which level of comprehension monitoring they may be struggling, which in return will allow us to develop more individualized instruction for all readers.

Children's Early Awareness of Comprehension as Evident in Their Spontaneous Corrections of Speech Errors.

A crucial human cognitive goal is to understand and to be understood. But understanding often takes active management. Two studies investigated early developmental processes of understanding management by focusing on young children's comprehension monitoring. We ask: When and how do young children actively monitor their comprehension of social-communicative interchanges and so seek to clarify and correct their own potential miscomprehension? Study 1 examined the parent-child conversations of 13 children studied longitudinally in everyday situations from the time the children were approximately 2years through 3years. Study 2 used a seminaturalistic situation in the laboratory to address these questions with more precision and control with 36 children aged 2-3years.

Effects of an Inconsistency-Detection Training Aimed at Improving Comprehension Monitoring in Primary School Children

Grounded within the situation model framework, this study investigated the effectiveness of a reading comprehension strategy training aimed at improving children's comprehension monitoring strategies. Sixty-four third and fourth graders received a 4-week training targeted at situation model updating, evaluative and self-regulatory strategies, and metacognitive awareness. A group (n = 51) following the school's regular reading comprehension curriculum served as the control group. The inconsistency-detection training was expected to show a pretest-to-posttest enhancement in comprehension monitoring strategies (measured with the inconsistency-detection paradigm), general reading comprehension, and reading motivation. Results showed that, compared with the control group, fourth graders' inconsistency-detection performance significantly improved after the inconsistency-detection training. Third graders did not show a significant gain. General reading comprehension and reading motivation scores were promising for children receiving the inconsistency-detection training. In summary, our inconsistency-detection training was an effective means to enhance children's use of monitoring strategies required for constructing and updating a coherent situation model and to transfer these strategies to novel texts.

A,B seeing: The role of constructive processes in children's comprehension monitoring.

Using E. M. Markman's (1977, 1979) comprehension-monitoring paradigm, 192 skilled and less skilled readers from 3rd and 6th grade read stories containing inconsistent information. Half of the students constructed a storyboard representation of the story using plastic cutout figures placed on a background storyboard; half only read the text. Storyboard construction enhanced the integration of text propositions and increased inconsistency detection, particularly for less skilled readers. A story recall test also revealed significant effects of storyboard construction on the encoding and recall of critical propositions. These findings were interpreted in terms of the dual effects of storyboard construction on enhanced encoding and memory and its demands on proposition integration. Furthermore, it is proposed that storyboard construction can serve as a basis for effective intervention and training of proposition integration skills.

A,B seeing: The role of constructive processes in children's comprehension monitoring.

A,B seeing: The role of constructive processes in children's comprehension monitoring.

Facilitating the Communicative Competence of the Child Witness

Efforts to elicit reliable testimony from children are frustrated by developmental limitations on children's communicative competence. This study examines (a) how children cope when adults ask incomprehensible questions, and (b) whether interview perfonnance can be enhanced by facilitating children's comprehension monitoring and response strategies. One hundred and eighty children, half 6 and half 8-years-olds, were assigned randomly within age group to 1 of 3 treatment conditions (training, instructions, control) and I of 2 interviewer conditions (familiar, unfamiliar). Children's memories of a previously staged event were tested with interview questions varying in comprehensibility. Results suggest that when confronted with difficult-to-comprehend questions regarding easily recalled information, children in the control group tried to answer anyway but were as likely to respond incorrectly as correctly. In contrast, when children were instructed to verbalize their lack of comprehension, and given a rationale for doing so, they performed significantly better than the control group. Moreover, when children received instructions and prepared for the interview with practice detecting and coping with noncomprehension, the training group demonstrated marked improvements in interview performance compared with the other 2 groups. Results demonstrate that although children's limited communication skills present a barrier to reliable testimony, it is one that might be minimized by instructions or preparation of child witnesses.

Comprehension Monitoring in Beginning Readers

In this study, 132 first graders' comprehension-monitoring skills were examined and related to their decoding and listening-comprehension skills. Decoding skills were tested with a word-picture matching task and with word-naming and word-nonword decision tasks. Story-listening tasks were used in determining the level of listening comprehension. Children's comprehension monitoring was measured by means of an online method in which reactions to embedded comprehension obstacles (lexical, syntactical, factual falsehoods, or contradictions) were assessed. The number of "lookbacks" and the time spent in reading the target words/sentences were recorded and used as indicators of activities involved in comprehension monitoring. The results indicated that monitoring one's comprehension is already present in beginning reading but that the level of decoding and listening-comprehension skills affects the ways and efficacy of monitoring.

Do levels of interest have an effect on children's comprehension monitoring performance?

This study examines the effect of interest levels on the comprehension monitoring ability of 8- and 9-year-old children. Two groups participated in the study; they were matched for single-word reading and vocabulary skills, but differed in comprehension skill. Two tests were carried out which required the children to read a number of brief passages, some of which contained embedded problems. The children's task was to identify the problems. Test 2 was game-like in nature and the children reported finding it more interesting than Test 1. Interest level was found to affect test performance in the poor comprehenders' comprehension monitoring: a significant improvement in their performance was found at high interest levels (Test 2). However, the performance of the good comprehenders was independent of interest level. This study suggests that the comprehension-monitoring deficit in the poor comprehenders is not irreversible, and is likely to be related to poor motivation and low levels of interest. The implications for remedial education are discussed.

Children's comprehension monitoring: Training children to use rereading to aid comprehension

Abstract The present study examined the effect of training fourth‐grade children to utilize the regulation strategy of rereading as a means of answering questions about previously read text. During training, the reader was provided with a series of prompts to look back to prior paragraphs of a story in order to answer questions about the text. A control group of subjects did not receive such training. Results from a post‐training test phase indicated that trained subjects used the rereading strategy, measured in the form of lookbacks, significantly more often than did control subjects. They were also more likely than control subjects to produce correct responses following a lookback to questions about more distantly read text.

Children's recognition of inconsistencies in science texts: Multiple measures of comprehension monitoring

AbstractThe goal of this research was to compare various indices of problem detection in children's comprehension monitoring of science passages. Three experiments were conducted with third and fifth grade students who were asked to review paragraph descriptions of unusual plants and report difficulties in understanding the material. Half of the paragraphs contained contradictory information concerning familiar and unusual plants, whereas the apparent inconsistencies were explained in the remaining paragraphs. Children were asked to report their comprehension problems (Experiments 1‐3), and to suggest additional information to include or remove to improve the comprehensibility of the paragraphs (Experiments 1 and 2). Measures of children's reading behaviour were also collected (Experiment 3). The results showed that although there was some evidence that children discriminated between the clear and inconsistent paragraphs, in general, children significantly overestimated how well they understood the new information about the unusual plants.

Improving Young Children's Listening by Verbal Self-Regulation: The Effect of Mode of Rule Presentation

ABSTRACT The purpose of the present study was twofold: to enhance children's listening by promoting the use of self-regulative skills, and to examine the effects of the mode of presentation of a comparison rule on listening skills. Forty-two kinder- gartners and first graders were involved in two rule-utilization sessions under one of the following conditions: interrogative mode, declarative mode, and control. These two sessions were followed by two posttests, in which the children were not prompted to use the comparison rule. The children who were exposed to the rule detected more ambiguous messages than did the children in the control group during rule-utilization sessions, and the interrogative mode improved the 5-year-olds' listening skills, but not the 6-year-olds' listening skills, more than the declarative mode did. The results of the present study indicate that young children's comprehension monitoring skills have been underestimated in previous research, and they stress that different modes of ru...

The influences of speakers' characteristics and mothers' informal listening instruction on children's evaluations of messages

Age of speaker and mothers' informal instruction about listening were examined as influences on children's evaluations of orally-presented messages. Second- and fourth-grade children listened to one of four speakers (two women and two nine-year-old girls) presenting essays on videotape. Children were asked for their evaluative responses to the essays, some of which were internally inconsistent. Mothers of the children were asked what they would say to their children in hypothetical listening situations. Analyses indicated that children reported more inconsistencies with adult speakers than with child speakers. Mothers' tendency to use communicative feedback that drew explicit attention to the communicative activity was positively associated with children's detection scores for the second-grade group, but not for the fourth-grade group, and this association persisted when family social class was taken into account. Findings are discussed in terms of the relevance of social factors for children's comprehension monitoring.

Children's Comprehension Monitoring and Recall of Inconsistent Stories

ZABRUCKY, KAREN, and RATNER, HILARY HoRN. Children's Comprehension Monitoring and Recall of Inconsistent Stories. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1986, 57, 1401-1418. Third and sixth graders (M age = 9.13 and 11.92 years, respectively) were videotaped reading inconsistent stories presented 1 sentence at a time. We assessed children's comprehension evaluation with onand off-line measures (reading times and verbal reports) and comprehension regulation by measuring look-backs during reading. All children read inconsistencies more slowly than control information, but sixth graders were more likely to look back at inconsistencies during reading and report inconsistencies following reading. In addition, recall and recognition memory were affected by text inconsistencies. Individual difference analyses revealed that evaluation measures were not related to each other and were related to regulation only for younger children. Evaluation measures were also related to recognition and recall of inconsistencies and to overall passage retention for older children. Results highlight the sensitivity of different comprehension monitoring measures in assessing children's skills and the importance of treating comprehension monitoring as a multidimensional process.

Children's Comprehension Monitoring and Recall of Inconsistent Stories

Children's Comprehension Monitoring and Recall of Inconsistent Stories

The Effects of General and Specific Self-Instruction Training on Children's Comprehension Monitoring Performances during Reading

tary school aged children's comprehension monitoring during reading. Forty-four fourthgrade average readers were given either general self-instruction, task-specific self-instruction, task-specific didactic instruction or control practice training for detecting inconsistencies in text. Immediately after training, both self-instructional procedures proved effective for enhancing children's error detection ability relative to the control procedure and the general self-instruction promoted greater performances than didactic instruction. After 3 weeks, the self-instructional students retained their performance superiority over the control students and both self-instructional procedures elicited greater performances than equivalent teacher-directed instruction. The general self-instructions increased students' tendency to monitor a wider range of conceptual information than the task-specific self-instructions. The discussion centers on the centrality of the self-verbalization component of training, issues of generalizability and directions for future research on self-instructional training during reading remediation.