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Sensitivity to story information that conflicted with expectations was examined in kindergarten, second, fourth, and sixth grade children. The children either read or listened to stories about familiar events. One story was consistent with children's "scripts" for these events, while the other story contained script-inconsistent information. All participants were questioned about the stories immediately and one week later. Equivalent proportions of students detected the anomaly initially and at recall; but listeners had more difficulty noticing inconsistencies than readers. Older students recalled more story information, and they remembered consistent stories better than inconsistent stories. (Author/RL)

Several research studies were reviewed to formulate a definition of metacomprehension in elementary school children. Although much additional research is needed, the one conclusion evident from the review is that metacomprehension is not a unitary phenomenon. It encompasses several kinds of abilities and degrees of awareness that may appear at different ages and interact with various task demands and situations; so it may manifest itself in certain circumstances but not in others. Younger elementary school children do not seem to utilize spontaneously the many options they have available for improving their comprehension. Studies have shown how various manipulations can be employed to increase the possibility that children will attend to significant features of texts, indicating that instructional procedures can be developed to train students to become more sensitive to their own comprehension. (RL)

This study examined the ability of young children to correct comprehension errors, considered to be an aspect of comprehension monitoring. Kindergartners and second graders (N=32) heard a story about an unfamiliar situation, then answered questions which either assessed information contained within a single sentence, required the correct identification of the referent of a word, or depended on the integration of information across sentences. Initially, both groups responded to reference questions best, though second graders answered more questions correctly overall. Participants were then given the opportunity to listen to the story again to see if they could identify information needed to correct their previous responses. Second graders corrected nearly half of their errors, kindergarteners, more than a third of theirs. Thus these young children exhibited some ability to improve their comprehension when given a means to do so. Integration questions were least likely to be corrected, however. Young children may thus have difficulty organizing and relating information from different parts of a passage. (Author/JMB)

The effect of passage topic and task demands on elementary school students' monitoring of their own comprehension was examined. Second, fourth, and sixth grade students read a short passage about a well-known event (playing checkers) or one about which they had little existing information (making lye soap). Half of the students in each grade were presented with questions about their passage before they read it, while the others saw the questions only after reading. Students in the first condition could consult the questions while reading; all participants could refer to the passage read when answering comprehension questions. Students' spontaneous efforts to engage in either of these behaviors were recorded. Very few participants consulted the questions while reading, although more sixth grade students did so, as did more of the students who read the passage about the unfamiliar event. Significantly more students who read the lye soap story referred to the text when responding to comprehension questions than did students who read the checkers passage. Comprehension of the story about the more familiar situation was better; and sixth grade students answered more questions correctly than did second or fourth grade students. (RL)

A study compared the relative effects of typographically cued or mapped text, intact text with signaling, and intact text without signaling on the recall and retrieval of information from prose passages. (Signaling, a noncontent aspect of prose, emphasizes certain aspects of the semantic content or points out aspects of the structure of content.) Sixty college students were randomly assigned to one of 12 experimental groups that read one passage for recall (responding to 12 questions without referring to the text) and then another passage for retrieval (responding to questions by referring to the text). The types of passage read (nonsignaled, signaled, or mapped) and the order of presentation of two passages were completely counterbalanced. No main effects were significant in the analysis of scores on the retrieval task, although the signaled version produced significantly better performance on questions about intermediate-level information. Consistent with results of the work of B. Meyer and others, this study showed that signaling produced insignificantly better recall of information on probed recall tasks. The results raise questions about the current practice in the field of text design of using typographic and spatial cues to highlight text information. (RL)

This study assessed the ability of third, fifth, and seventh graders to learn a problem-solving heuristic scheme and apply it to grade-appropriate tasks. A framework was utilized that focused on metacognitive aspects of task performance such as planfulness, strategy selection, monitoring, and evaluation. It was expected that use of the scheme would require a degree of reflection about one's own thought processes that might be unavailable to younger students. A football analogy was developed to represent five steps in the problem-solving scheme, with each step associated with an appropriate question. A total of 10 students in each grade were taught the steps and shown how to apply them in everyday situations, concrete puzzles, and reading tasks. They were scored on their ability to remember the steps and use them with other reading passages, both immediately and at a follow-up session two weeks later. It was found that seventh graders could remember the problem-solving steps at follow-up better than the younger students could and were better able to use the scheme in the independent reading tasks. It was concluded that seventh graders, at least, could learn to apply such a scheme to a variety of academic tasks. (Author/RH)

An earlier study found virtually no relationship between college students' reported studying practices and various tests of reading comprehension, so a second study investigated whether different results would be obtained with an instrument based on study strategies college students actually reported using. Scores on this instrument were to be correlated with course grades and test scores. Directions asked 76 college students in an earth science course and 73 secondary students in a physics course to report what they do when they study an assigned book chapter. Via a 5-point Likert Scale, the students indicated the frequency of their use of 18 strategies, which were organized into 4 sections. The four sections of the instrument dealt with: (1) previewing the chapter; (2) the initial reading; (3) failures in comprehension; and (4) chapter review. Items regarding previewing strategies were weighted at three levels according to the degree of information a student could obtain from using a procedure, while strategies in the other sections were weighted at three levels according to the extent of active processing involved. Results were similar for both groups, although the college students had significantly higher quantitative and qualitative scores than the high school students. The students' measures of their study practices were then compared to their course grades and test scores. The results reiterate those of the previous study and raise further questions about the supposed relationship between reported study strategies and academic performance. The questionnaire items are appended. (NKA)

A study examined the effects of a year-long inservice program to help experienced teachers in one elementary school appreciate and use recent research in reading comprehension. All teachers at an urban K-6 elementary school in a midwestern city attended the weekly inservice sessions which focused on the importance and role of background knowledge in reading comprehension. Other aspects of comprehension that were emphasized included recognizing story structure and sequence, distinguishing between inferred and given information, deriving "main ideas" from details and inferences, assessing comprehension, and developing different kinds of comprehension questions. At the beginning and end of the school year the teachers were asked to list terms that yielded a semantic picture of the concepts participants associated with reading comprehension. From this inventory, a list of 45 word pairs was constructed. Teachers were then asked to circle the member of each pair closer to their ideas of reading comprehension. Thirty-one sets of scores were obtained on the first occasion, and 29 sets on the second occasion. Results indicated that this project noticeably influenced what the teachers thought about reading comprehension. Participants seemed to acquire an enriched, more differentiated conception of comprehension, demonstrated by a larger, more precise vocabulary about comprehension. Findings suggest that the teachers gained a greater appreciation of the factors involved in reading comprehension. (NKA)