Understanding the Fourth-Grade Slump : Comprehension Difficulties as a Function of Reader Aptitudes and Text Genre

Our goal in this project is to develop a better understanding of young readers’ difficulties in comprehending text, and how those difficulties vary as a function of reader aptitudes and text genre. Therefore, we examined the effects of reading decoding abilities and world knowledge (assessed using the Woodcock–Johnson III Tests of Achievement) on 61 third-grade readers’ comprehension of narrative and expository texts. The children read a narrative (445 words) and an expository (464 words) text. Comprehension of each text was assessed with 12 multiple-choice questions. Comprehension of the narrative text improved as a function of decoding ability. In contrast, expository text comprehension was driven by world knowledge. The latter result indicates that the low-knowledge children were not able to make the knowledge-based inferences required by the expository text, replicating previous work conducted with adult populations (e.g., McNamara, 2001). Potential solutions such as increased text cohesion and reading strategy instruction will be discussed. The results of this study highlight the importance of text genre and reader knowledge when examining reading comprehension abilities.

[1]  J. B. Wyman,et al.  What is reading ability , 1921 .

[2]  George J. Spilich,et al.  Acquisition of domain-related information in relation to high and low domain knowledge. , 1979 .

[3]  Paul J. Feltovich,et al.  Categorization and Representation of Physics Problems by Experts and Novices , 1981, Cogn. Sci..

[4]  P. Johnson-Laird.  Mental models , 1989 .

[5]  James F. Voss,et al.  Star Wars: A developmental study of expert and novice knowledge structures , 1985 .

[6]  Philip B. Gough,et al.  Decoding, Reading, and Reading Disability , 1986 .

[7]  M. Lundeberg,et al.  Metacognitive Aspects of Reading Comprehension: Studying Understanding in Legal Case Analysis. , 1987 .

[8]  Philip B. Gough,et al.  The simple view of reading , 1990 .

[9]  W. Kintsch.  The role of knowledge in discourse comprehension : a construction-integration model , 1991 .

[10]  T. Trabasso,et al.  Constructing inferences during narrative text comprehension. , 1994, Psychological review.

[11]  W. Kintsch,et al.  Are Good Texts Always Better? Interactions of Text Coherence, Background Knowledge, and Levels of Understanding in Learning From Text , 1996 .

[12]  Danielle S. McNamara,et al.  Learning from texts: Effects of prior knowledge and text coherence , 1996 .

[13]  Kevin S. McGrew,et al.  Analysis of the major intelligence batteries according to a proposed comprehensive Gf-Gc framework. , 1997 .

[14]  Walter Kintsch,et al.  Comprehension: A Paradigm for Cognition , 1998 .

[15]  Michael C. Pyryt.  Human cognitive abilities: A survey of factor analytic studies , 1998 .

[16]  D. Meichenbaum,et al.  Nurturing Independent Learners: Helping Students Take Charge of Their Learning , 1998 .

[17]  John B. Carroll,et al.  The Analysis of Reading Instruction: Perspectives From Psychology and Linguistics , 2000 .

[18]  J. Oakhill,et al.  Working memory resources and children's reading comprehension , 2000 .

[19]  James H. Martin,et al.  Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition , 2000 .

[20]  Ulrich Schiefele,et al.  Predictors of reading literacy , 2001 .

[21]  D. McNamara.  Reading both high-coherence and low-coherence texts: effects of text sequence and prior knowledge. , 2001, Canadian journal of experimental psychology = Revue canadienne de psychologie experimentale.

[22]  Max M. Louwerse,et al.  10. Computational retrieval of themes , 2002 .

[23]  Kouider Mokhtari,et al.  Assessing students' Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies , 2002 .

[24]  A. Graesser,et al.  Need to Learn in Order to Process Coherence Relations in Narrative and Expository Text ? , 2002 .

[25]  G. Reid Lyon,et al.  Reading Development, Reading Difficulties, and Reading Instruction Educational and Public Health Issues , 2002 .

[26]  Danielle S McNamara,et al.  iSTART: Interactive strategy training for active reading and thinking , 2004, Behavior research methods, instruments, & computers : a journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc.

[27]  Danielle S. McNamara,et al.  Reading Strategy Training: Automated Verses Live , 2004 .

[28]  Danielle S. McNamara,et al.  Self-explaining science texts: strategies, knowledge, and reading skill , 2004 .

[29]  D. McNamara.  SERT: Self-Explanation Reading Training , 2004 .

[30]  Danielle S. McNamara,et al.  What’s a Science Student to Do? , 2019, Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.