… to completely analyze what we do when we read would almost be the acme of a psychologist's dream for it would be to describe very many of the most intricate workings of the human mind, as well as to unravel the tangled story of the most remarkable specific performance that civilization has learned in all its history. (Huey, 1908/1968, p. 8) Huey's eloquent statement about the goals of the psychology of reading is as relevant today as it was when he wrote it in 1908. The quotation usually precedes an apology for how little we have learned in the past 75 years. We wish to break with that tradition and use Huey's statement to introduce an essay in which we will try to demonstrate that while we have not fully achieved Huey's goal, we have made substantial progress. Our task is to characterize basic processes of reading comprehension. We will not present a model of the entire reading process, beginning with the focusing of the eye on the printed page and ending with the encoding of information into long-term semantic memory or its subsequent retrieval for purposes of demonstrating comprehension to someone in the outer world. Instead, we will focus on one aspect of comprehension of particular importance to reading comprehension: the issue of how the reader's schemata or knowledge already stored in memory, function in the process of interpreting new information and allowing it to enter and become a part of the knowledge store.

A schema-theoretic view of basic processes in reading comprehension

What Classroom Observations Reveal about Reading Comprehension Instruction. Technical Report No. 106.

This study examines epistemological belief assessment and the relationship between belief in simple knowledge and mathematical text comprehension. In Experiment 1, an epistemological questionnaire developed earlier (Schommer, 1990) was administered and factor analyzed. The factor structure was replicated, measuring beliefs in externally controlled learning, simple knowledge, quick learning, and certain knowledge. In Experiment 2, students were instructed to read either to determine the comprehensibility of passage information or to teach passage information. Then students read a statistical passage, assessed their understanding, and completed a mastery test and study strategy inventory

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Epistemological beliefs and mathematical text comprehension: believing it is simple does not make it so

Analysis of protocols from adults thinking aloud while reading identified four potentially teachable strategies. In a teaching experiment involving 80 students in Grades 7 and 8, significant advantages were found in both target strategy acquisition and reading comprehension for a treatment that combined thinking-aloud strategy modeling and practice with instruction in identification and use of the target strategies. Neither strategy modeling and practice alone, nor question-answer comprehension activities, were effective. Even in the successful group, instruction was effective with only three of the strategies. Implications for identification of teachable strategies are discussed.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3233543.pdf

Use of Thinking Aloud in Identification and Teaching of Reading Comprehension Strategies

Individual differences in reading comprehension standards were examined by asking 90 undergraduates to describe the criteria they used to decide whether or not they had comprehended textbook chapters. Students were classified as having a dualistic (fact-oriented) or a relativistic (context-oriented) conception of knowledge on the basis of their ratings of attitude statements drawn from Perry (1968). Comprehension criteria reported by dualists more often involved the knowledge category of Bloom et al's (1956) Taxonomy, and those reported by relativists, the comprehension or application categories. The nature and number of reported comprehension criteria were predictive of course grades in Fundamentals of Psychology: Students reporting the use of comprehension or application criteria earned better grades than those reporting the use of knowledge criteria; students reporting the use of more than one criterion earned better grades than those reporting the use of a single criterion. These data suggest that one's epistemological beliefs may dictate one's choice of comprehension standards, and that these epistemological standards, in turn, may control the effectiveness of one's text processing efforts. Adult readers vary dramatically in the way they study text materials, and these differences are associated with the quality of

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Monitoring Text Comprehension: Individual Differences in Epistemological Standards

"To appear in: Learning strategies / Harry O'Neil (Ed.). New York : Academic Press, 1979." --T.p.

Thomas H. Anderson

Papers

Study skills and learning strategies