Students making sense of informational text: Relations between processing and representation

Abstract

Much of our understanding of children's reading has been based on research with narratives, where children can rely on relatively rich prior knowledge to make sense of the text. Far less work has been conducted on children's meaning construction processes for nonnarrative, informational texts about unfamiliar topics, such as those often encountered in school content areas. This research examines children's strategies for processing informational text to understand and remember new information. In Experiment 1, 4th‐ and 6th‐grade students thought aloud as they read an easier and a harder passage. They dictated a recall report after each passage. The think‐aloud protocols were analyzed for processing activities, including paraphrasing, elaborating, explaining, monitoring, and identifying and resolving problems. In general, processing tended to focus on the local, sentence level. Self‐explanations were prevalent throughout the protocols; however, they were differentially effective in promoting understanding. Content analyses of 5 cases illustrate complex relations between processing activities and the completeness and coherence of participants’ recall reports. In Experiment 2, new samples of 4th‐ and 6th‐grade students read the same passages silently. The think‐aloud procedure in Experiment 1 encouraged readers to process each sentence successively and more elaborately, with little overt looking back. In contrast, silent readers (Experiment 2) engaged in more physical backtracking to previously read sentences. Comparisons of recall performance across experiments indicated that the think‐aloud procedure facilitated the 6th graders’ performance but hindered that of the 4th‐grade students. A multidimensional framework reflecting prior knowledge use and the quality of the textbase is proposed as a general heuristic for conceptualizing learners’ processing and representation construction.