Children's Use of Prior Knowledge and Experience in Understanding Informational Text on Nutrition.

A study examined how students use their prior knowledge and experience to help them understand a text, and how that influences what they recall from the text. Subjects, 46 sixth graders from 3 elementary schools in Nashville, Tennessee, were tape recorded as they thought aloud while reading either a passage on "sugar" or a passage on "fat." Passages were of similar length and were at grade 5 level of reading difficulty. Subjects also dictated their recall of the passage. Results indicated that the majority of the children's think-aloud comments were some kind of attempt to explain or elaborate on the text, with the largest category being bringing in information from prior knowledge or experience to help understand the text. Results also indicated that: (1) the amount of information recalled from texts was very low; (2) more students included in their recalls information from sentenced adults rated as important in the text; and (3) no statistically significant correlations existed between amount recalled and reading percentile score on the subjects' Tennessee achievement test reading comprehension scores. Two case studies illustrate the relationship between what the children were doing as they read and what their recall reports were like. Individual differences evident in think-aloud protocols led to the conclusion that memory measures such as the recall report do not adequately capture the richness and depth of children's understanding of text. (A figure and a table of data are included; the think-aloud protocols and recall reports of the two case study subjects are attached.) (RS)