READING COMPREHENSION

9 M e r l i n C. W i t t r o c k

READING COMPREHENSION

When people read with comprehension they generate meaning for written language. To construct meaning for written or printed words and sentences, readers employ complex psychological processes. Readers attend to the text. They create images and verbal transformations to represent its meaning. Most impressively, they generate meaning as they read by constructing relations between their knowledge, their memories of experiences, and the written sentences, paragraphs, and passages. In this chapter, we will discuss these complex processes of reading comprehension. I will begin the discussion with an introduction to a model of reading comprehension as a generative process. After the introduction of the model, we will discuss several of the fundamental processes of reading comprehension, attention, encoding, and memory. Last of all, throughout the chapter, we will elaborate relations between the model, the research on these processes, and the facilitation of reading comprehension.

Reading Comprehension as a Generative Process In our recent research studies, we find that children and adults read with comprehension when they generate meanings for written language by relating it to their knowledge and memories of experience. NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL AND COGNITIVE PROCESSES IN READING

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By this constructive process, they make sense of prose and connected discourse. I find that comprehension involves more than reading an author's syntactically correct, semantically plausible sentence or passage. The generation of literal or inferential meanings for written language involves the reader's organized knowledge and memories of experience. Apparently the reader's active construction of verbal, imaginai, and related representations for the text, using knowledge, experience, and context, produces or enhances the understandings that comprise reading comprehension. In brief, to comprehend a text, we not only read it, in the nominal sense of the word, we construct a meaning for it. To comprehend written language we must do more than read it, and more than construct a meaning for it. We must derive the constructed or reconstructed meaning or meanings from the syntactic and semantic characteristics of the written language that we read. These meanings include the author's intended messages, their extensions, inferences, and embellishments. These generated meanings, which can be constructions at different levels of abstraction, also include alternative, unintended, text-derived interpretations and understandings, even when they contradict the writers' intentions. For example, modern-day meanings children construct as they read fairy tales, such as the Cinderella story, might differ substantially either from the meanings children constructed for this story many years ago, or from the author's intended meaning. If the unintended literal or inferential constructed meanings are derived from the text, they too evidence reading with comprehension. We might say, then, that reading with comprehension is the disciplined generation of meaning for written language. We do not know if reading comprehension consists of a distinctive set of psychological processes, or if it consists of a great variety of psychological processes. In one study, Kintsch and Kozminsky (1977) found that reading comprehension shared a common core of psychological processes with listening comprehension. However, LaBerge and Samuels (1974) believe that the process of reading comprehension may be as complicated as thinking itself. In the generative model, we incorporate the previously introduced common core of psychological processes of reading comprehension, and we expect to find a variety of currently unknown processes used differently by different people, depending upon the context, the readers' intentions, plans, expectations, purposes, knowledge, and experience. The reading of a poem, a narrative, a description, a word problem, a cookbook, a repair manual, a lesson in a reader, or of individual sentences involves more than an essential core of grammatical, syntac-

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tic, and semantic processes of comprehension. They involve different contexts, vocabulary, background knowledge, rules, and distinctive, relevant experiences in unknown ways in the transformation of written linguistic symbols into meaningful mental representations. The reading of a single word, as different from a sentence, a paragraph, or a passage, also involves the generative process of comprehension discussed here. We usually think of reading comprehension occurring with sentences and larger units of written language. However, the generative model implies that learners construct word meanings as well, again using context and other cues in the process. In brief, then, reading comprehension involves, differently for different people and contexts, the psychological processes involved in generating meaning by relating the parts of the text to one another and to stored information such as rules, schemata, and memories of events. The model was introduced earlier (Wittrock, 1974) and supported in several studies of reading comprehension (Doctorow, Wittrock, & Marks, 1978; Wittrock, Marks, & Doctorow, 1975), which will be discussed in this chapter. The model implies some changes in the teaching of reading comprehension to children and young people. The teaching of reading comprehension in elementary schools usually entails teaching the central idea of each paragraph of a text and the construction of literal meanings for the texts, often without the active development of cognitive interactions between the text and the learner's experience, schemata, events, and rules. Reading in secondary schools also often involves the isolation of ideas in the text from the learners' experience and knowledge, in an effort to obtain accurate recall and understanding. As a result, students learn to reproduce information for the examination, but not to relate experience to it, or to reorganize it into more coherent or more useful schemata. The active generation of meaning by relating the text to memories and schemata, that is, the generative model, leads to different ways for teachers to facilitate comprehension.

Early Research on Reading Comprehension We will now selectively examine the research literature in cognition and neuropsychology that involves reading comprehension. We will begin with a brief look at the history of the scientific study of reading comprehension. It will be followed by a discussion of recent research on the processes of reading comprehension and its measurement.

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Gesture language and picture language date to the antiquity of civilizations. Babylonian writing had passed beyond pictographs 6000 years ago, as had Egyptian writing (Huey, p. 187, reprinted in 1968). Reading as thought-getting is also centuries old. Mathews (1966, p. 193) quotes a third- or fourth-century Latin source in which Cato tells his son to read with understanding, "for to read and not understand is not to read at all." In Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it became imperative for people to learn to read. The Protestant reformation emphasized the importance of each person learning to read the Bible. The common methods used to teach beginning reading were similar to those used by the Greeks and the Romans. Drill on the names of the letters followed by the sounding of combinations of consonants, vowels, and syllables often comprised initial reading instruction. Comprehension apparently was not stressed. In the late nineteenth century in Europe and America, scientists who studied reading and experimental psychologists often shared some interests, at least in the area of reaction time studies. At Wundt's experimental psychology laboratory in Leipzig, James M. Cattell studied individual differences in the recognition of letters, words, and print. In one experiment, he found that people read the letters in words twice as fast as they read comparable groups of letters not connected into words. Subjects also read words grouped into sentences twice as fast as they read comparable words not grouped into sentences. Although comprehension was not the focus of early research in experimental psychology, Cattell pioneered the study of reading. He showed some of the effects upon reading produced by the meaningful grouping of letters and words. E. L. Thorndike and A. I. Gates, both prominent figures in reading research, studied with James Cattell. From about 1890 to about 1910, research in reading was a central theme in psychological laboratories. Some of the then-current topics resemble contemporary subjects once again under study in the laboratory. Perception, inner speech, and the nature of meaning in reading were all frequently studied. In his book on reading, Huey (1908) wrote a chapter on each of these subjects, along with chapters on the pedagogy of reading. Huey discussed serial processing, parallel processing, imagery, verbal processes, and meaning, as an active process reflecting the readers' knowledge and cognition, all topics that have present day counterparts. In his discussions of these topics, he believed that people, especially adults, use auditory images or word sounds more than visual images to represent word meanings. With a model of word meaning reminiscent of James' theory of emotion, Huey concludes that

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meanings in reading were mostly feelings, motor responses, and movements associated with the sentences. However, he tempered his associationistic analysis of word meaning by noting that the speaking of a sentence "comes at some distance behind the eye [p. 167]." That is, the lag in time between the looking at the words and the speaking of them implied that people constructed their meaning by cognitively processing the visual stimuli and the feelings associated with them. In contrast to these early interests in cognitive and neuropsychological processes, from about 1910 until about 1955, many experimental psychologists became interested in behaviorism. As a result, they largely abandoned studies of the cognitive processes of reading. Unfortunately, only a few examples of important studies of the processes of reading exist in the literature for that period. However, during that same interval of time, the centuries-old debate about the teaching of initial reading continued unabated among educators. Should children first learn to comprehend words and sentences, or should they first learn to pronounce letters, and to speak words and sentences? With the decline of interest in the study of the psychological processes of reading comprehension, that question remained unanswered. When the study of cognitive psychology returned to prominence, about 1955, reading comprehension again became an acceptable topic to research and to theorize about. Imagery and verbal processes, eye movements, attention, and perception, to name a few, once again became important topics that interested educators and psychologists alike. Some new and important findings about the psychological processes of reading comprehension have come from these recent studies and from attempts to theorize about reading with comprehension. We will now discuss some of these studies with the intent of building an understanding of some of the cognitive processes involved in reading comprehension. Although the processes of reading comprehension involve vocabulary, syntax, grammar, and decoding, we will concentrate on the research that deals directly with the semantic processes in the construction of meaning. Most of these studies deal with written language, but some of them deal with spoken language because it shares with reading some of the processes of comprehension.

The Measurement of Reading Comprehension Before we begin to examine the recent research, we will discuss the measurement of reading comprehension. I will indicate a new and

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unusual measure appropriate for measuring comprehension as a generative process. Researchers, commercial test makers, and teachers usually measure reading comprehension without regard to any single conceptualization or theory of reading. In one commonly used method of measuring reading comprehension, after reading the text, the student answers multiple choice questions about the facts and the concepts in the sentences and paragraphs of the passage just read. The researchers who designed and conducted the recent international study of reading comprehension in 15 countries (Thorndike, 1973) used this technique, as did the makers of the commercially published tests used in this massive study. Another commonly used method of measuring reading comprehension involves the Cloze test, in which the student encounters reproduced segments of the original text modified by the deletion of every fifth or tenth or so word. The student attempts to insert in the blanks, which occur where words have been deleted, the words originally used in the text. The number of words correctly inserted in the blanks measures comprehension. Neither of these useful techniques necessarily measures reading as a generative process, which involves the cognitive interactions between the readers' knowledge and experience, the context, and the text itself. To measure these processes, we need tests that delve beyond the surface structure of a passage into its meaning. The measurement of comprehension involves transfer of learning (Wittrock, 1968), rather than the measurement of behavior specific to the surface structure of the message. To measure the generative processes of reading comprehension, a test must go beyond the verbatim recall of information. Tests that involve the construction or identification of paraphrases, inferences, summaries, examples, applications, analogies, and metaphors change the surface structure while holding constant the meaning of the written language. These tests can measure the generative processes of reading comprehension. The differences between tests that measure the generative processes of reading and more conventional tests of reading comprehension deserve further comment. Correct answers on tests of verbatim memory such as Did this sentence appear in the text? do not necessarily indicate comprehension. However, discounting the effects of guessing, some incorrect answers on the same type of test do indicate comprehension; for example, an affirmative answer to the previous question when the surface structure of the test sentence has been changed although the meaning of the test sentence remains the same as the meaning of its counterpart in the text.

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Correct answers to questions about the similarity in surface structure of text sentences and test sentences do not measure generative processes in comprehension. Instead, recognition of similarity or identicality of sentence meaning across changes in surface structure does indicate comprehension. Text-derived meanings that incorporate the learners' knowledge and experience index generative processes in comprehension. Inferences, elaborations, and applications often involve and measure these generative processes. From this analysis, I infer that teachers of reading sometimes measure reading comprehension in ways that discourage students from relating their experience and knowledge to the text. Teachers often ask the student to report the main idea of a paragraph or a story, which is an acceptable measure of reading comprehension. However, that technique may sometimes discourage relating the paragraph to knowledge or to experience, evaluating it, applying it, and elaborating it. These generative processes might reduce performance on tests that emphasize literal summaries not confounded with relations between the learners' everyday activities and beliefs and the information in the book. The teaching technique encourages abstract learning that may not function or transfer outside the classroom. The learning may not become associated with the learners' activities and experience. Now that we have introduced measures of reading comprehension, we will discuss the recent research on the psychological processes of reading comprehension. We begin with attention, then turn to encoding and memory. As mentioned previously, these are not the only psychological processes involved in reading comprehension, but they comprise a common core of important generative processes. In each of the following sections, the active role of the individual in the construction and the reconstruction of meaning provides the theme that organizes the research and emphasizes its meaning for understanding reading comprehension.

Attention Selective attention, and methods of influencing it, interests many cognitive psychologists and neuropsychologists who study reading, including reading comprehension. In a study of selective attention in good and poor sixth grade male readers, Willows (1974) inserted an irrelevant text into a written passage. He found the poor readers were distracted by the surface structure, the appearance, of the inserted irrelevant text. The good readers were distracted by the meaning of the inserted irrelevant text. The good readers automatically decoded the

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text and attended to its meaning, while the poor readers attended to the visual qualities of the stimulus and decoded them. The study implies that, to comprehend a text, one must attend to its meaning. Different meanings can be constructed from the text by directing the learners to different information in it, and by giving the learners different goals for reading the text, such as to learn its meaning or to remember the facts in it. Adjunct Questions Pre- and post adjunct questions, which are questions inserted into a text either before or after the paragraphs relevant to answering the respective questions, influence reading comprehension. Questions about the meaning of the material tend to facilitate a broad, conceptually oriented learning. Prequestions tend to direct attention to the specific information, fact, or idea relevant to the answer to the question. As well as stimulating a broad learning of relevant, previously read information, postquestions direct attention in subsequent paragraphs to the broad type of information relevant to answering previous postquestions. With college undergraduates, Sagaria and Di Vesta (1978) found that prequestions led to a narrowly focused, sometimes verbatim, processing, while postquestions led to a broader, sometimes more meaningful processing that resulted in the learning of a variety of information. Boyd (1973) also reported that prequestions enhanced selective attention. Boker (1974) found that prequestions facilitated learning of the specific answers to the questions, whereas postquestions facilitated nonverbatim learning as well as verbatim learning. Prequestions inserted in the text enhance learning or comprehension of the questioned material, but often reduce learning of other material. Because they appear in the text after the relevant paragraph, postquestions cannot narrow attention to a specific answer in a previously read paragraph, at least not as it is initially read. Postquestions can direct attention in subsequent paragraphs to the types or the classes of material probably useful for answering later postquestions. Consequently, postquestions enhance comprehension and broaden learning. When we interpret the effects of pre- and postquestions, we should remember that the distinction between them is somewhat artificial. Each of them occurs between paragraphs. Postquestions can work forward, influencing the processing of following paragraphs. Prequestions can also work backward, influencing rehearsal of previous paragraphs. The distinction between pre- and postquestions holds only with regard

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to a given paragraph, not to a given passage. The major finding is that they influence retention. Questions constructed by children also influence retention. Ross and Killey (1977) studied the effects on retention produced when fourth-graders asked and received answers to their own questions about pictures they saw. Compared with questions asked by other children, asking their own questions facilitated memory. Inserted questions can also enhance comprehension as well as retention. Andre and Womack (1978) found that, compared with verbatim questions, paraphrased adjunct questions facilitated comprehension among college students. The comprehension tests consisted of paraphrased questions not seen earlier in the study. Mayer (1975,1978) found that meaningful learning increased with the insertion in the text of adjunct questions or testlike events that directed the readers toward understanding information or to applying principles, rather than to rote learning. There are developmental differences in the ability to control attention and to construct meanings for sentences. Brown and Smiley (1978) found that young children often do not know the important units of information in a text. Those children who spontaneously attended to the important units in the text, who underlined and took notes, improved their comprehension. Another study (Myers & Paris, 1978) showed that young children often do not know the semantic structures of paragraphs, the strategies for comprehending meaning, or the objectives for reading a text. Young children have not yet learned to control their attention, to set goals for reading, and to view reading as the construction of meaning instead of the verbatim recall of written material. Perhaps some young children can profit from instruction in the constructive processes of reading and in the control of attention. The development of strategies for reading texts might well begin with teaching children to generate their own questions that will help them to attend selectively to the meaning of the prose. Goals and Objectives Another way to influence attention when reading is to give the learner objectives to be attained. Duell (1974) found that behaviorally defined objectives directed the readers' attention to material that is often ignored. Kaplan and Simmons (1974) found that information not specific to a given objective was best learned when the objective appeared after the text was read. Information specific to the objective was learned well either when the objective came before or after the text

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was read. Royer (1977) gave college students a passage on the development of computers to read. Either specific or general objectives were given either before or after the students read the passage. Compared with objectives given after the passage was read, objectives given before the passage was read enhanced the learning of information directly relevant to the objectives. The objectives given after the passage was read enhanced the learning of information not directly relevant to the objectives, compared with the learning of information directly relevant to the objectives. Duchastel (1979) found that objectives given to Swiss college students reading passages on energy facilitated their memory of the passage. He reports that "This finding lends further support to the view that objectives influence learning through a process of selective attention [p. 106]." The objectives increased free recall primarily when they called attention to paragraphs low in structural importance to the text. Either high structural salience in the organization of the text or a high salience stimulated by objectives and goals enhances selective attention to the meaning of the passage. These results parallel the findings reported for inserted questions. Goals and objectives given to learners before they read a text focus attention, and thereby enhance comprehension and memory of information relevant to the goal. Goals and objectives given to learners after, compared with before, they read a text focus attention less narrowly, and consequently enhance comprehension or memory more broadly. The Mechanisms

of

Attention

We are beginning to get data that describe some of the mechanisms involved in goal-mediated learning. Rothkopf and Billington (1979) studied inspection times and eye movements of high school students given specific goals before reading a passage about océanographie data. The goal-relevant sentences of the text doubled eye fixations and increased their length by 15 msec, yet total time to read the passage was not increased. Apparently, less time was devoted to the reading of the remaining sentences. The study cannot show conclusively that the increased number and length of eye movements caused increased comprehension and retention. Selective attention implies more than looking at a target, and more than additional eye fixations. Although time and frequency of looking at the surface features of the text may correlate with attention, it is attention to the meaning of the text that is crucial.

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Neuropsychologists also study the mechanisms of selective attention, albeit at a different level. Teyler, Megela, and Hesse (1977) measured brain wave responses evoked by visually different stimuli with identical meanings, or by visually similar stimuli with different meanings. The meaning of the stimuli, not their appearance, determined the responses. In another study, the contexts of ambiguous words determined their meaning and also evoked different forms of brain waves (Brown, Marsh, & Smith, 1973). Components of brain wave responses index different types of attention. A brain wave component at 100 msec after a stimulus is presented indexes attention to external stimuli. Later components (200-300 msec latency) index internal events, such as expectations, short-term memory, and response sets. Expectancy also produces a change in wave forms, called the contingent negative variation (CNV), that occurs after a warning stimulus but be/ore a stimulus that elicits a response. Conners (1970) found a correlation of - .6 between a left parietal lobe brain wave component at 200 msec latency and reading achievement among third and fourth graders. With 9-year-old poor readers, compared with good readers of comparable age, Preston, Guthrie, and Childs (1974) found a brain wave component of reduced amplitude at 180-msec latency only in response to light flashes, not in response to words. The implication is that the good and poor readers in their study differed in ability to attend, but not in ability to read words. Some of the most dramatic findings regarding attention and reading comprehension involve research with hyperkinetic children, who sometimes improve in ability to learn when given the proper dosage of a stimulant drug, such as Ritalin. The paradoxical effect of a stimulant drug reducing hyperactivity sometimes results from the medicine's influence upon arousal and attention. Hyperkinetic children sometimes are less aroused than normal children. More importantly, hyperkinetic children sometimes have a relatively flat gradient of attention across distracting, task-relevant, contextual stimuli. The stimulant drugs increase arousal somewhat. More significantly, in one study, the drugs increased the voluntary control of attention, which enabled children to inhibit their responses to distracting contextual stimuli (Conners, 1976). The drugs produce attentional effects among hyperkinetic children similar to the attentional effects produced among many children by instructions, objectives, and inserted questions. The deficit of attention shown by hyperactive children occurs primarily in voluntary rather than in involuntary sustained attention (Krupski, 1980). With measures of skin conductance, hyperactive

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children showed deficits of attention only with active tasks, not with passive tasks. Again, voluntary attention seems to be implicated in some problems of learning, such as reading with comprehension. Within the framework of attention described in this section, a group of psychologists developed an intervention program to improve reading comprehension among hyperactive children. Douglas, Parry, Martin, and Garson (1976) used cognitive training techniques developed by Donald Meichenbaum to teach 18 hyperactive children in 3 months to control their impulses and to regulate their problem-solving strategies. Even though the cognitive training program was not aimed directly at reading, the intervention did increase scores on some reading achievement tests, on tests of organization and planning, and on the Matching Familiar Figures Test, which measures analytic ability. Malamuth (1977) also used self-management, cognitive training techniques with poor readers. The training increased ability to sustain attention and also improved reading performance among these children, who were not hyperactive. Before we discuss encoding, let us summarize the research on attention as a process involved in reading comprehension. In this section on attention we found evidence to indicate that selectively attending to the meaning of a text, rather than to its surface structure, enhances comprehension. Reading with goals or specific objectives in mind directs attention and facilitates comprehension of relevant information. Inserted questions also direct attention and, consequently, often enhance the comprehension of meanings relevant to the answers to questions. Good and poor readers sometimes differ in brain waves that index attention. Further, stimulant drugs that enhance attention sometimes facilitate learning among children. At a cognitive level and again at a neural level, the data indicate that attention is one of the important psychological processes involved in different types of comprehension of different types of reading materials, and different comprehension strategies.

Encoding and Memory In this section on encoding and memory, we will examine other fundamental psychological processes involved in reading comprehension. To comprehend written information, a reader does more than attend to it. In 1974,1 reported that people often understand or comprehend information by relating it to their knowledge and experience.

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From these cognitive interactions between incoming information, knowledge, and memories of experience, they generate meanings and encode them into memory. To facilitate comprehension, the model implies that we should stimulate the active generation of relations between knowledge, experience, and written stimuli. We can enhance the construction of these interactions in numerous ways, such as by stimulating (a) the strategies or processes learners use to comprehend text; (b) the knowledge base or experience of the learner; and (c) the characteristics and organization of the text. These three types of components involved in reading comprehension have been frequently studied. A discussion of results obtained in some of these recently conducted studies in each of these three categories follows.

Generative Processes Wittrock and Carter (1975) asked college students to read hierarchically arranged words either by generatively processing them, that is, by constructing relations involving them, or by reproductively processing them, that is, by copying them. Whether the words were properly or randomly arranged in the hierarchy, even when the words were not conceptually related to one another, generative processing of them resulted in substantial increases in memory. Doctorow, Wittrock, and Marks (1978) asked 400 sixth-graders of three different reading ability levels to read a story, taken from a commercially published reader, and to write, in their own words, a sentence about each paragraph immediately after reading it. In addition, some groups of students were given paragraph headings, either to be incorporated into their sentences or omitted from them. The generation of their own sentences was hypothesized to facilitate the construction of relations between experience, knowledge, and the story. The paragraph headings were intended to serve as cues for the relevant schema, that is, for relevant, organized knowledge stored in memory. The data closely supported the predictions. As predicted, in each of the two experiments, in ascending order, the insertion of headings, the student generation of sentences for paragraphs, and the combination of headings and generated sentences enhanced retention and comprehension. The abstract paragraph headings were relatively more effective with the better readers, while the generated sentences were relatively better with the poor readers, although each condition facilitated comprehension with each group. The combination of the generation of

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sentences and the insertion of paragraph headings doubled comprehension for each group of learners at each level of reading ability. The effect was replicated across three different stories and three different tests. Kathryn Au (1977) reported the results of a cognitive training program used to teach reading comprehension to native Hawaiian children in the first, second, and third grades. In the program, the teacher actively involves the children in the verbalization of their experience and knowledge as they read each story. The teacher's frequent questions emphasize that, in their own words, the children express ideas about the reading material, recall events that relate to the story, and make inferences from the ideas in the text. Instead of grapheme-phoneme correspondences, the program emphasizes the construction of meaning for the text by elaborating upon it. Compared with comparable classes not given the year-long cognitive training program, as measured by the Gates-MacGinite Reading Test, reading achievement substantially improved as a result of the instruction. In the first grade, the average percentile rank for the cognitive training class was 69, and, for the three control classes, the averages were 8, 21, and 27. In the second grade, the percentile ranks were 42 for the experimental group and 8 and 10 for the control groups. In the third grade, the average percentile ranks were 27 for the experimental group and 7 for the control group. In all grades, the experimental program had existed for only 1 year. From those data, it seems that children do not always understand that reading involves bringing knowledge and experience to bear on the text. More encouraging, it also seems that young children performing at very low percentile rankings in reading can learn to construct relations between the text and their own experience and knowledge. With college students, Kane and Anderson (1978) found that students who completed the missing last word of the sentences they read increased their learning and, to a lesser extent, their retention as compared with students who only read the sentences. The effects held whether the written words were correct or incorrect, although the incorrect words apparently reduced retention somewhat. Rickards and August (1975) studied college students reading sentences in which some words were either underlined for them or were to be underlined by them. The highest average learning occurred when the readers underlined any words they wished, and the second highest average learning occurred when the learners underlined words of structural importance. The underlining of words of high or low struc-

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turai importance by the experimenter did not influence learning. When the readers underlined words of low structural importance, learning decreased. Note-taking is another way of inducing learners to generate elaborations and inferences. Peper and Mayer (1978) compared the generative functions of note-taking, in the sense that it increased the construction of relations between new information and experience, with the less integrative activity of remembering information by keeping it separate from experience. Note-taking facilitated assimilative encoding and supported a generative model of comprehension. Another way to facilitate a cognitive interaction between knowledge and text is to ask learners to take a point of view or perspective as they read a story; for example, to take the point of view of a burglar or a home buyer as they read a story about a house (Pichert & Anderson, 1977). The significance of the information for the perspective adopted by the learners influenced their learning and their recall of it 1 week later. In a later study, using essentially the same materials, Anderson, Pichert, and Shirey (1979) found that among undergraduates, the home buyer and the burglar perspectives, when given before reading, selectively enhance encoding. When given after reading, they selectively enhance retrieval. Paris, Lindauer, and Cox (1977) taught young children to construct paragraphs about sentences they read. The children's goal was to construct a story. The generation of stories facilitated comprehension and memory of the sentences by allowing the child to construct inferences about them. Apparently young children, ages 7 and 8 years, can compose effective inferences about sentences, but they rarely spontaneously construct inferences to achieve goals, such as the remembering of information. Kail, Chi, Ingram, and Danner (1977) also studied children's construction of inferences in reading comprehension. Second graders and sixth graders both learned to build inferences from sentences, but the older children were no more accurate than the younger children. Di Vesta, Hayward, and Orlando (1979) investigated generative processes in reading comprehension among good and poor readers in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. Poor readers tended to use a strategy called "running text," that is, to read the sentences strictly in the order in which they were written. The good readers tended to use a different strategy called "searching subsequent text." The good readers showed substantial control over their processing of text, knowledge about com-

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prehension as the goal of reading, and a realization that the text, and the order in which its ideas are presented, is not the only source of information available to them for comprehending its meaning. In sum, a wide variety of data indicate that reading comprehension is a generative process. Good readers often engage in the constructive processing of text. A number of techniques, including simple directions, increase generative processing and consequently reading comprehension. The studies of generative processes reviewed in this section have emphasized verbal elaborations. We will now discuss imagery as a cognitive strategy in reading comprehension. Especially important for the purposes of this chapter are procedures, such as instructions, that lead to self-generated images as they relate to reading comprehension. The effects of pictures given to the learners will be discussed in a later section. Because Levin discusses imagery at length in Chapter 8 of this volume, we will mention only several studies here to depict some of the nonverbal generative processes of reading comprehension. Self-generated images facilitate reading and reading comprehension somewhat, although young children, less than 8 years old, frequently do not spontaneously generate effective images. One way to stimulate the generation of images for words or texts is to ask children to draw simple pictures of them as they read. Bull and Wittrock (1973) found that the meanings of words were better learned and remembered when fifth graders drew pictures of the definitions of terms rather than when they rehearsed or copied the words. Levin (1973) gave fourth graders who were poor readers an imagery organizational strategy before they read a story. Only the poor readers who had good vocabulary increased their comprehension of the story with the imagery strategy. Pressley (1976) taught 8-year-old children to construct mental images of the sentences and the paragraphs of the stories they read. Compared with a control group that only read the story, the imagery group comprehended or remembered better the events of the story. With learners younger than 8 years, induced imagery usually fails to facilitate comprehension or retention. Wolff and Levin (1972) studied the development of the ability to generate images with paired associate tasks. They found that kindergartners could not, but third graders (i.e., 8-year-olds) could construct images to help them remember associations among words. Although that study does not deal directly with reading comprehension, it does help to establish the time when imagery ability is rapidly increasing in children. Several studies have attempted to stimulate the generation of im-

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ages by giving children within the age range of 5 - 8 years partial pictures while they listen to or read a story. Guttman, Levin, and Pressley (1977) found that the partial pictures or imagery instruction facilitated reading comprehension for the third graders but not for the kindergartners (see their Experiment 2). Dynamic partial pictures, that is, pictures illustrating motion, increased the learning of propositions. In another study (Ruch & Levin, 1977), partial pictures presented with the passage but not presented with the text again facilitated comprehension among third graders listening to a story. In another study, 10-16-year-old mentally retarded children did not increase their recall of story information when given instructions to generate images as they listened to the passage as it was read to them (Bender & Levin, 1978). Ability to construct images as a way to read with comprehension develops at about 8 years of age. Prior to that age, asking children to construct their own images often does not enhance reading comprehension or memory. Most recently, newly defined types of processes of reading comprehension differentiate readers from one another. We will mention one of these processes. Individuals differ substantially in their styles of comprehension. Spiro (1979) reports that some individuals rely heavily on a "top-down" process of comprehension, in which they use their knowledge base to infer meaning for text. Other individuals use a "bottom-up" process, in which they emphasize the text and its meaning with little reliance upon their schemata or knowledge base. These "top-down" and "bottom-up" processes may actually be different emphases within the process of generating relations between knowledge, experience, and the text. In either case, relations between internal processes and the text influence comprehension, whether one starts to build associations from the inside-out or from the outside-in. From these studies of verbal processes and imagery in encoding, it is clear that comprehension and retention often increase when readers generate cognitive representations for the information they read. We also learned several points about the delicate relations between the learners' individual differences, in age and ability, and the effectiveness of different procedures for stimulating generative processing of written or spoken language. Effective techniques for stimulating constructive elaborations by learners sometimes interact with the learners' cognitive abilities (Delaney, 1978) and depend upon the developmental level or the age of the learner (Tirre, Manelis, & Leicht, 1978). With college undergraduates learning foreign language vocabulary words, Delaney found that verbal elaborations would be better than visual elaborations for learners with

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high verbal fluency, while visual elaborations would be better than verbal elaborations for learners with low verbal fluency. Tirre et al. (1978) asked adults reading abstract and concrete passages from textbooks of mammalogy and archaeology to construct conceptual relationships among words in text using either a verbal strategy or an imagery strategy. Thp verbal strategy produced greater comprehension than did the imagery strategy for both concrete and abstract words. We are also beginning to see the development of cognitive training programs for the teaching of reading comprehension. Meichenbaum and Asarnow (1978) report that Bommarito and Meichenbaum taught seventh- and eighth graders with comprehension levels 1 or more years below their grade level to organize their reading habits and, as they read a story, to ask themselves questions about its main idea, its important details, its sequence of events, and its characters' feelings. Compared with a control group who did not get the self-instructional training, but who did receive the training sessions and reading materials, the experimental group averaged greater mean change scores: 11.5 months gain on the Nelson Reading Test and 13.5 months gain on a Cloze Exercise Test. These results indicate that at least some poor readers read passively without actively searching for the meaning or the meanings of the text. Their results imply that the skills of active reading can be taught to some readers at least, and that reading comprehension can improve as a result of a cognitive training program.

Knowledge Base of the Learner In the previous section we discussed cognitive processes learners use to comprehend information as they read. We emphasized studies designed to stimulate people to use effective comprehension strategies, which often involve the construction of relations between knowledge, experience, and the reading material. In this section on the knowledge base of the learner, we will examine studies that show a different approach to stimulating the generation of relations between text and knowledge and experience. The difference in approach emphasizes the knowledge and the information, rather than the comprehension strategy, that the learner brings to the task of making sense of the written language. One obvious way to try to enhance the relation between text and knowledge is to provide the learner with relevant background information, advance organizers, and useful schemata. Another way cues the readers to

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remember previously learned information relevant to comprehending the text. Dooling and Christiaansen (1977) varied the influence of the reader's knowledge upon the comprehension of a story read by college undergraduates by telling one group of them, and not telling another group, that the story was about a famous person, for example, Helen Keller. Information about the theme of the story led to thematic errors later. The errors evidenced the use of their knowledge about the famous person to construct or to reconstruct information not contained in the passages they read. Royer, Perkins, and Konoid (1978) told groups of undergraduates that a biographical passage was about either a famous person known to them, for example, Winston Churchill, or a fictitious person unknown to them. The groups given the name of the famous person made many false positive errors on sentences thematically related to the famous person. Brown, Smiley, Day, Townsend, Michael, and Lawton (1977) gave second grade through seventh grade children appropriate frameworks for comprehending ambiguous passages read to them. The framework enhanced recognition and comprehension and produced intrusion errors consistent with the orientation provided by experimenter-given schemata. There were very few developmental trends in these effects of frameworks upon comprehension. As did the adults, the children had difficulty distinguishing between the information in the text and their own elaborations upon it, although the older children made substantial use of their background information in the recall of text. They also made many thematically relevant intrusion errors. Again, it is clear that meaning is not specified wholly by the written language. The learner's background knowledge, and the ways it relates to the text, contribute to the construction of meaning by the learner. Pearson (1979) studied reading comprehension among second graders given a passage to read about spiders. The readers with greater prior knowledge about spiders performed better than readers with less knowledge about spiders on items involving inferential comprehension. No difference between the groups occurred on items testing the specific information stated in the written passage. The data imply that background knowledge is especially important in going beyond the literal comprehension of the text. Recall of information stated in the text can be achieved, apparently, in a more rote, less integrative fashion than can inferential comprehension. It is appropriate to conclude this section with several references to David Ausubel's extensive work on advance organizers. Nearly two

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decades ago he showed (Ausubel & Fitzgerald, 1962) that background knowledge enhances learning of new material, and that advance organizers provide subsuming concepts that facilitate learning and retention of conceptual material (Ausubel, 1960). More recently, advance organizers again enhanced comprehension of written materials. Mayer (1978) gave undergraduates a text on computer programming that was either scrambled or logically ordered. An advance organizer facilitated learning of the scrambled text, but not of the logically organized text. Advance organizers can compensate for poorly organized text. They seem to increase the utility of relevant background knowledge.

Text and Its Context In addition to the readers' strategies of comprehension and background knowledge, the characteristics of the text itself can be used to enhance the relations between knowledge and experience and written language. In a study of Wittrock's model of generative learning, Wittrock, Marks, and Doctorow (1975) showed that 10-12-year-old children sizably enhanced their comprehension and retention of unfamiliar and undefined words when these words were embedded in familiar stories. These results held for children of low, middle, and high reading ability, whether they read the stories or listened to them being read aloud. The familiar story provided the context used to generate meaning for the unfamiliar words. The generative model of learning also predicts that substituting one higher frequency word for one lower frequency word in each sentence enhances the comprehension of sentences difficult to understand. In three experiments with sixth-grade children, the substitution of a familiar word for an unfamiliar word in each sentence of a text taken from a commercially published reader substantially increased comprehension, frequently by 50%, for readers of high, middle, and low ability levels reading materials at and above their reading level. The effect occurred across three different levels of reading ability, six different stories, and six different tests of comprehension. In a previously mentioned study (Doctorow et al., 1978), paragraph headings inserted into the text facilitated reading comprehension among junior high school students, apparently by stimulating use of relevant knowledge to construct interpretations of the meanings of the paragraphs. These results occurred across different levels of reading ability, different stories, and different types of comprehension.

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Tenenbaum (1977) studied the effects of text organization upon reading comprehension among high school seniors. A hierarchical organization of the passage enhanced learning of the main idea and of facts. Glynn and Di Vesta (1977) gave undergraduates a structural outline of the passage they were to read about minerals and varied the logical sequencing of the text. Compared with a scrambled order of the paragraphs of the text, a logical order enhanced comprehension, but not recall of unique or isolated facts. The structural outline given during retrieval enhanced elaborations and inferences upon the text. McClure and Mason (1979) gave third-, sixth-, and ninth graders six-sentence-long scrambled stories to reorder in their correct sequences. The results indicate that the surface features of the story are far less important than the deep structure of the story for the comprehension of its meaning and for the reordering of its parts into a proper sequence. In an extensive study, Marshall and Glock (1978) examined the effects of four text characteristics, such as where the main idea was placed in a paragraph, upon the reading comprehension of undergraduate learners from an Ivy League university and a community college. The surface text characteristics influenced the learning of the community college students but not the Ivy League students, who attended to the intended meaning of the text. The authors infer that highly able readers attend primarily to the meaning of the text, not to its surface characteristics. Pictures and high imagery words facilitate paired-associate learning and memory among children and adults. Standing, Conezio, and Haber (1970) found that people recognized 90% of the 2500 pictures they saw 3 days earlier. In paired-associate learning, pictures and high imagery stimulus terms often facilitate performance (Paivio, 1971). With children and adults, Wittrock and Goldberg (1975) found that high imagery words facilitated free recall of words. Pictures and words of high imagery value enhance memory. But what are the effects of pictures upon reading comprehension? Some authors (Willows, 1978) maintain that pictures distract readers' attention from the meaning of the text. However, his pictures, for example, of a cat presented alongside the word dog, provided an inappropriate context for facilitating comprehension. His results indicate that pictures can affect comprehension as well as memory. In studies where pictures are used to represent the objects and events presented in the text, the data often indicate a facilitative effect on listening comprehension or reading comprehension. Bransford and Johnson (1972) studied comprehension among high school students

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given ambiguous passages to decipher. When appropriate pictures or verbal headings were given to the learners before they heard the stories, their comprehension of them sizably improved. Much lower comprehension was obtained when the pictures or the story headings were given to the students after they had heard the passages. Arnold and Brooks (1976) gave pictures or verbal organizers to elementary school children before they read paragraphs to them. The organizers that presented the relationships among the ideas in the text enhanced comprehension. The pictures were more effective than the verbal organizers with the fifth graders. Rohwer and Matz (1975) read stories to middle-class white and lower class black fourth graders, who simultaneously viewed either printed or pictorial versions of the texts. Although the results are open to alternative interpretations, it seems that both groups of fourth graders comprehended more information in the pictorial version than in the printed version. Guttman et al. (1977) found that pictures, when compared with partial pictures, instructions to construct images, and a control condition, produced the greatest listening comprehension among kindergartners and second graders. Bender and Levin (1978) found that the listening comprehension of mentally retarded children rose from 40 to 60% when pictures were provided to them as they heard stories read aloud. From these data, pictures appropriate for the text enhance comprehension among adults and among children of different ages, abilities, and socioeconomic levels. Pictures seem to work well with young children as early as kindergarten age at least, which is younger than the ages, about 7 - 8 years, when children can construct images to enhance comprehension. Words of high frequency value or of high imagery value also facilitate reading comprehension. Marks, Doctorow, and Wittrock (1974) facilitated reading comprehension among sixth graders, often by 25%, by substituting in each sentence of the text one high frequency synonym for a word of lower frequency. Jorm (1977) found that good and poor readers, 8-11 years old, could read high frequency words better than low frequency words. Only the poor readers read the high imagery words better than they read the low imagery words. The meaningfulness of words, the imagery of the words, and the use of appropriate pictures each influences reading comprehension. Each type of stimulus seems to facilitate the construction of representations for the ideas and the information contained in the written passages.

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Discussion To construct meaning for a text involves a set of complex psychological processes. Readers attend to the text. They perceive its written symbols as characters in a language. They decode or transform these linguistic representations into semantic units that can have meaning for them—morphemes, words, sentences, paragraphs, and passages. At each of these levels, the readers can encode the language by relating it to their knowledge and to their memories of experience. From the construction of these relationships comes reading comprehension. It is the process of going from the surface structure of a text to its meaning or meanings. Each level or unit of language introduces new variables into the construction of meaning for a text, when compared with the units that comprise it. For example, compared with words, sentences introduce syntax and parts of speech. As a result, readers can acquire meanings about events, states of being, principles, and abstractions. In every case, the meaning of the language representation is not printed on the pages of the text. Reading comprehension occurs only when the readers use their psychological processes—perception, attention, encoding, and memory—to transform the printed symbols into meanings reflective of their knowledge and experience. These psychological processes, along with linguistic, neurological, and situational or contextual variables influence the meanings people construct as they read. Reading comprehension consists of more than a reconstruction of the authors' intended meaning. Within the constraints of the vocabulary and syntax of the sentences of a passage, a reader can legitimately construct meanings at multiple levels of abstraction, or with reference to multiple issues of interest to the reader. The context and the reader's background of information and mental set contribute significantly to reading comprehension. If these multiple constructed meanings derive from the text, or are permissible transformations or inferences from it, then they evidence comprehension. Reading comprehension is not an idiosyncratic, anarchic phenomenon. But neither is it a monolithic, unitary process where only one meaning is correct. Instead, it is a generative process that reflects the reader's disciplined attempts to construct one or more meanings within the rules of language. In this chapter, we began with a brief discussion of my model of reading comprehension as a generative process. We focused upon a minimal set of these processes, attention, encoding, and memory, that

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dehne the model more precisely. At length we discussed recent research on ways to facilitate reading comprehension by influencing these psychological processes. In the study of attention and its facilitation, we found that good readers attend primarily to the meaning of the text, while poor readers attend more to its surface characteristics. The meaning of irrelevant sentences inserted into a text distracted good readers, while the surface structure of these same sentences distracted poor readers. Differences in ability to decode text does not adequately explain these results. The readers differed in attention and in their goals for reading. The so-called good readers concentrated on the construction of meaning. We also discussed ways to facilitate attention to the construction of meaning. Adjunct questions, often studied during the last 15 years, direct attention. Questions about the underlying principles, models, and concepts facilitate broad, conceptual learning. Questions about facts facilitate memory of specific information. Objectives given to learners also direct attention. Especially when the structurally important information in the text is not made salient by its organization, objectives enhance selective attention to its meaning. Either well-chosen conceptually oriented objectives or careful organization of the structurally important information enhances attention to the meaning of the text and facilitates reading comprehension and retention. From neurological research, we have important information about the mechanisms of attention. Brain wave components differentiate between attention to environmental stimuli and to internal events, such as expectations, response sets, and short-term memory. Some learning disabilities, such as hyperactivity, seem to be, at least in part, a deficit in attention, an inability to ignore contextual, task-relevant, but distracting stimuli. When stimulant drugs are given in correct dosage to hyperactive children, they sometimes steepen the gradient of attention to the learning task. As a result, learning improves. Most impressively, cognitive training programs designed to increase and to sustain attention enhanced reading comprehension in two studies, with hyperactive children in one study and with normal children in the other study. The cognitive training programs taught the children to control their impulses, to manage their activities, and to rehearse self-instructions that directed their energies to effective comprehension strategies and away from distractions. In the research on encoding and memory, we found that reading comprehension consists of more than attention to the meaning of the

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text. The active generation of relations between the learner's knowledge and experience and the text comprises an important part of reading comprehension. Several researchers, including my students and myself, report ways to facilitate these active constructions of relations between text and learner. One approach emphasizes learnergenerated verbal elaboration. In several studies, reading comprehension sizably increased, 50-100%, when learners constructed sentences about each paragraph of a text immediately after they read it. Inserted paragraph headings facilitated reading comprehension, especially when the learners incorporated these headings into their constructed sentences. Reading comprehension increased markedly when primary school children expressed in their own words, and related to their experience, the meaning of familiar folk stories read to them by their teachers. When children make inferences from stories and recall incidents in their lives that relate to the text, their comprehension of the text sometimes improves, as well as their ability to read with comprehension. When the learner has appropriate experience and adequate ability, completing missing last words in sentences, underlining words in sentences, taking a given perspective while reading a story, constructing inferences, and even taking notes facilitate reading comprehension. In each case, the facilitation seems to involve active learner generation of relations between the text and the reader's knowledge and memories of experience. Developmental differences in ability to construct verbal elaborations also exist. Prior to about 5 or 6 years, many children can profit from verbal elaborations given to them by another person. But they cannot often construct verbal elaborations to facilitate reading or listening comprehension. Beginning at about 5 or 6 years of age, with careful guidance, many children can construct verbal elaborations that facilitate comprehension of text and stories. After this age children can, but usually do not, spontaneously construct the verbal elaborations and inferences that facilitate comprehension. In this situation, directions to construct elaborations and inferences often produce marked improvements in reading comprehension. We do not know when, if ever, the ability to produce verbal elaborations becomes automatic. Even college undergraduates often profit from instructions to comprehend text by constructing verbal elaborations and inferences about its meaning. With imagery, the effects upon reading comprehension are also significant, although the developmental progression in ability to construct images differs from its counterpart with verbal stimuli. Although

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a few authors agree that pictures distract readers from the meaning of the text, the overwhelming results of relevant empirical studies indicate that pictures often facilitate reading comprehension, even among children 3-4 years of age. Directions to construct pictures or images also facilitate reading comprehension and retention. However, the facilitative effect of these learner-generated elaborations does not occur until about 8 years with most children, which is about 2-3 years later than the effect with directions to construct verbal elaborations. Individual differences in ability to generate verbal elaborations or imagery influence the process of constructing meaning for text. The research on this issue shows promising results, but it is only beginning to appear in the literature. In the next few years we expect to see research on cognitive styles, information-processing strategies, and individual differences in generative processes relate more closely to research in reading comprehension. The knowledge base of the learner, as it differs from cognitive style or ability to construct verbal or imaginai representations, affects reading comprehension. A well-organized and relevant background of knowledge facilitates reading comprehension and recall. Advanced organizers can enhance comprehension of text, especially when it is poorly organized. The organizers emphasize relations between the text and the reader's abstract relevant knowledge. The characteristics of the text and its context also influence reading comprehension. Children comprehend unfamiliar words when they are embedded in a meaningful context. As we mentioned earlier, appropriate pictures clearly facilitate reading comprehension and retention, as do high imagery words under some conditions. High frequency words enhance comprehension among good readers and poor ones. From the generative model of reading comprehension, the facultative effects of these characteristics of text and its context occur spontaneously because of the same processes, such as attention and encoding, that are stimulated externally by instructions to relate print to knowledge or experience. In summary, reading comprehension is the generation of meaning for written language. At least several psychological processes contribute to the construction of meaning. In this chapter, we discussed several of these processes—attention, encoding, and memory—and research about them. We found that reading comprehension can be facilitated by several different procedures that emphasize attention to the text and to the construction of verbal or imaginai elaborations. The generative model of reading comprehension, as supported by the research data reviewed here, implies the following conditions for fa-

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cilitating reading comprehension. When the readers cannot adequately attend to the text, cognitive training in attention, rehearsal strategies, and self-management techniques seems appropriate. When the readers attend to the text but cannot generate elaborations for it, then elaborations, such as verbal statements and pictures to represent its meaning or possible meanings, are appropriate for facilitating comprehension. When readers attend to the text and can, but do not, spontaneously generate a meaning for it, instructions to elaborate it verbally, to create images, to draw pictures, to construct inferences, applications, and analogies, or to assimilate it with higher order concepts seems appropriate. The objective is to induce the readers to construct these relations between the text and their knowledge and experience. The specific type of direction best for the reader depends upon many variables, including the nature of the text, the objectives for the reading, and the individual differences among the readers. When the readers attend to the text and construct meaning for it, reading comprehension can be influenced subtly by directions, questions, discussions, and the like chosen to induce and enhance meanings or inferences that might otherwise be ignored. As research on reading comprehension proceeds, we should learn more about these processes and about additional but as yet not understood neural and psychological processes people use to generate understanding from words on pages.

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Boyd, W., McK. Repeating questions in prose learning. Journal of Educational Psycholo­ gy, 1973, 64, 31-38. Bransford, J. D., & Johnson, M. K. Contextual prerequisites for understanding: Some investigations of comprehension and recall. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1972,,.11, 717-726. Brown, A. L., & Smiley, S. S. The development of strategies for studying texts. Child Development, 1978, 49, 1076-1088. Brown, A. L., Smiley, S. S., Day, J. D., Townsend, M. A. R., & Lawton, S. C. Intrusion of a thematic idea in children's comprehension and retention of stories. Child Develop­ ment, 1977, 48, 1454-1466. Brown, W. S., Marsh, J. T., & Smith, J. C. Contextual meaning effects on speech-evoked potentials. Behavioral Biology, 1973, 9, 755-761. Bull, B. L., & Wittrock, M. C. Imagery in the learning of verbal définitions. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 1973, 43, 289-293. Conners, C. K. Cortical visual evoked response in children with learning disorders. Psychophysiology, 1970, 7, 418-428. Conners, C. K. Learning disabilities and stimulant drugs in children: Theoretical implications. In R. M. Knights & D. J. Bakker (Eds.), The neuropsychology of learning disorders. Baltimore, Maryland: University Park Press, 1976. Delaney, H. D. Interaction of individual differences with visual and verbal elaboration instructions. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1978, 70, 306-318. Di Vesta, F. S., Hayward, K. G., & Orlando, V. P. Developmental trends in monitoring text for comprehension. Child Development, 1979, 50, 97-105. Doctorow, M. J., Wittrock, M. C , & Marks, C. B. Generative processes in reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1978, 70, 109-118. Dooling, D. J., & Christiaansen, R. E. Episodic and semantic aspects of memory for prose. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 1977, 3, 4 2 8 436. Douglas, V. I., Parry, P., Martin, P., & Garson, C. Assessment of a cognitive training program for hyperactive children. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 1976, 4, 389-410. Duchastel, P. Learning objectives and the organization of prose. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1979, 71, 100-106. Duell, O. K. Effect of type of objective, level of test questions, and the judged importance of tested materials upon posttest performance. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1974, 66, 225-232. Glynn, S. M., & Di Vesta, F. J. Outline and hierarchial organization as aids for study and retrieval. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1977, 69, 89-95. Guttman, J., Levin, J. R., & Pressley, M. Pictures, partial pictures, and young children's oral prose learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1977, 69, 473-480. Huey, E. B. The psychology and pedagogy of reading. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1968 (reprinted). Jorm, A. F. Effect of word imagery on reading performance as a function of reader ability. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1977, 69, 46-54. Kail, R. V., Jr., & Marshall, V. Reading skill and memory scanning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1978, 70, 808-814. Kail, R. V., Jr., Chi, M. T. H., Ingram, A. C , & Danner, F. W. Constructive aspects of children's reading comprehension. Child Development, 1977, 48, 684-688. Kane, J. H., & Anderson, R. C. Depth of processing and interference effects in the learning and remembering of sentences. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1978, 70, 6 2 6 635.

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Kaplan, R., & Simmons, F. G. Effects of instructional objectives used as orienting stimuli or as summary/review upon prose learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1974, 66, 614-622. Kintsch, W., & Kozminsky, E. Summarizing stories after reading and listening. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1977, 69, 491-499. Krupski, A. Sustained attention: Research, theory and implications for special education. In B. K. Keogh (Ed.), Advances in speciaJ education (vol. 1). Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1980. LaBerge, D., & Samuels, S. J. Toward a theory of automatic information processing in reading. Cognitive Psychology, 1974, 6, 293-323. Levin, J. R. Inducing comprehension in poor readers: A test of a recent model. Journal of EducationaJ Psychology, 1973, 65, 19-24. McClure, E., Mason, J., & Barnity, J. Story structure and age effects on children's ability to sequence stories (Technical Report No. 122). University of Illinois, Urbana, Center for the Study of Reading, May 1979. Malamuth, S. Self-management training for children with reading problems: Effects on reading performance and sustained attention. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1977. Marks, C. B., Doctorow, M. J., & Wittrock, M. C. Word frequency and reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1974, 67, 259-262. Marshall, N., & Glock, M. V. Comprehension of connected discourse: A study into the relationships between the structure of text and information recalled. Reading Research Quarterly, 1978, 14, 10-56. Mathews, M. M. Teaching to read. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966. Mayer, R. E. Different problem-solving competencies established in learning computer programming with and without meaningful models. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1975, 67, 165-169. Mayer, R. E. Effects of prior test-like events and meaningfulness of information on numeric and comparative reasoning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1978, 70, 29-38. Mayer, R. E. Advance organizers that compensate for the organization of text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1978, 70, 880-886. Meichenbaum, D., & Asarnow, }. Cognitive-behavior modification and metacognitive development: Implications for the classroom. In P. Kendall & S. Hollen (Eds.), Cognitive-behavioral interventions: Theory, research, and procedures. New York: Academic Press, 1978. Miller, R. B., Perry, F. L., & Cunningham, D. J. Differential forgetting of superordinate and subordinate information acquired from prose material. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1977, 69, 730-735. Myers, M. II, & Paris, S. G. Children's metacognitive knowledge about reading. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1978, 70, 680-690. Paivio, A. imagery and verbal processes. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971. Paris, S. G., Lindauer, B. K., & Cox, G. L. The development of inferential comprehension. Child Development, 1977, 48, 1728-1733. Pearson, P. D., Hansen, J., & Gordon, C. The effect of background knowledge on young children's comprehension of explicit and implicit information (Technical Report No. 116). University of Illinois, Urbana Center for the Study of Reading, March 1979. Peper, R. J., & Mayer, R. E. Note taking as a generative activity. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1978, 70, 514-522. Pichert, J. W., & Anderson, R. C. Taking different perspectives on a story. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1977, 69, 309-315.

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Pressley, G. M. Mental imagery helps eight-year-olds remember what they read, journal of Educational Psychology, 1976, 68, 355-359. Preston, M. S., Guthrie, J. T., & Childs, B. Visual evoked responses in normal and disabled readers. Psychophysiology, 1974, 11, 452-457. Rickards, J. P., & August, G. J. Generative underlining strategies in prose recall. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1975, 67, 860-865. Ross, H. S., & Killey, J. C. The effects of questioning on retention. Child Development, 1977, 48, 312-314. Rothkopf, E. Z., & Billington, M. J. Goal-guided learning from text: Inferring a descriptive processing model from inspection times and eye movements. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1979, 71, 310-327. Rohwer, W. D., Jr., & Matz, R. Improving aural comprehension in white and black children: Pictures versus print. Journal of Experimental Child PsychoJogy, 1975, 19, 23-36. Royer, P. N. Effects of specificity and position of written instructional objectives on learning from lecture. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1977, 69, 4 0 - 4 5 . Royer, J. M., Perkins, M. R., & Konoid, C. E. Evidence for a selective storage mechanism in prose learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1978, 70, 457-462. Ruch, M. D., & Levin, J. R. Pictorial organization versus verbal repetition of children's prose: Evidence for processing differences. AV Communication Review, 1977, 25, 269-280. Sagaria, S. D., & Di Vesta, F. J. Learner expectations induced by adjunct questions and the retrieval of intentional and incidental information. Journal of Educational Psychol­ ogy, 1978, 70, 280-288. Spiro, R. J. Etiology of reading comprehension style (Technical Report No. 124). University of Illinois, Urbana, Center for the Study of Reading, May 1979. Standing, L., Conezio, J., & Haber, R. N. Perception and memory for pictures: Single-trial learning of 2500 visual stimuli. Psychonomic Science, 1970, 19, 73-74. Tenenbaum, A. B. Task-dependent effects of organization and context upon comprehension of prose. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1977, 69, 528-536. Teyler, T. J., Megela, A., & Hesse, G. Habituation and generalization of the ERP to linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli. In D. Otto (Ed.), Perspectives in event-related brain potential research. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1977. Thorndike, R. L. Reading comprehension education in fifteen countries. New York: Halsted, 1973. Tirre, W. C , Manelis, L., & Leicht, K. L. The effects of imaginai and verbal strategies on prose comprehension in adults. (Technical Report No. 110). University of Illinois, Urbana, Center for the Study of Reading, December 1978. Willows, D. M. A picture is not always worth a thousand words: Pictures as distractors in reading. Journal of Educational PsychoJogy, 1978, 70, 255-262. Willows, D. M. Reading between the lines: Selective attention in good and poor readers. Child Development, 1974, 45, 408-415. Wittrock, M. C. Learning as a generative process. Educational Psychologist, 1974, 11, 87-95. Wittrock, M. C. Three conceptual approaches to research on transfer of training. In R. Gagne (Ed.), Learning research and school subjects. Itasca, Illinois: Peacock Press, 1968. Wittrock, M. C , & Carter, J. Generative processing of hierarchically organized words. American Journal of Psychology, 1975, 88, 489-501. Wittrock, M. C , & Goldberg, S. Imagery and meaningfulness in free recall: Word attributes and instructional sets. Journal of General Psychology. 1975, 92, 137-151.

9. READING COMPREHENSION

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Wittrock, M. C , & Lutz, K. Reading comprehension and the generation of verbal analogies and summaries, in preparation. Wittrock, M. C , Marks, C. B., & Doctorow, M. J. Reading as a generative process. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1975, 67, 484-489. Wolff, P., & Levin, J. R. The role of overt activity in children's imagery production. Child Development, 1972, 43, 537-547.