HOW KNOWLEDGE INFLUENCED TWO INTERVENTIONS DESIGNED TO IMPROVE COMPREHENSION

Abstract The purpose of the present study was to compare two interventions designed to improve students’ comprehension of a problematic text. The first involved revising the text to improve coherence, and the second was designed to promote active engagement through asking inference‐promoting questions. Three groups of 18 fifth graders read either an original social studies text, a revised version of the text, or were asked questions while reading the original text. While the quantitative results showed no differences among the three groups in amount of information recalled and the number of questions answered correctly, qualitative analyses showed that those students who were asked questions tended to recall the central points in the passage. The lack of advantage for the revised text is in contrast to findings from previous research on promoting text comprehension through text revision. Explanations for this difference are offered by considering the unexpected effects of students’ knowledge. Further, the...

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