Congruence of Prior Knowledge and Text Information as a Factor in the Reading Comprehension of Middle-Grade Children. Technical Report #16.

Two studies were conducted that investigated congruency of text information with prior knowledge as a factor in the reading comprehension of middle grade children. In both studies children read texts containing both congruent and incongruent information. New information that contradicted common beliefs of children similar to the subjects of the study was labelled incongruent information while new information similar to the prior knowledge of the children was labelled congruent. The purpose of the first study was to develop an instrumont to identify fifth and sixth-grade children who overrely on prior knowledge in their comprehension of text. Large differences between comprehension scores for congruent and incongruent information were considered an indication of the use of a strategy of overreliance on prior knowledge. A group was identified that found congruent information much easier than incongruent Ingormacion. Although many of the differences found could be attributed to chance factors, similarities among the children in the group suggested that part of the variance of the difference score might ba attributable to special difficulty that these children experienced with incongruent information. The purpose of the second study was to investigate how degree of congruency interacts with degree of explicitness and level of staging of information to affect the reading comprehension of fourth and