Abstract. To investigate the applicability of schema-theoretic notions to young children's comprehension of textually explicit and inferrable information, slightly above-average second grade readers with strong and weak schemata for knowledge about spiders read a passage about spiders and answered wh-questions tapping both explicitly stated information and knowledge that necessarily had to be inferred from the text. Main effects were found for strength of prior knowledge [p < .01), and question type (p < .01). Simple effects tests indicated a significant prior knowledge effect on the inferrable knowledge (p < .025) but not on explicitly stated information. A follow-up study was conducted to verify the fact that the question type effect was not due to the chance allocation of inherently easier questions to one of the two question types. We found a reliable decrease in question difficulty attributable to cueing propositional relations explicitly in the text (p < .01). These data were interpreted as supporting and extending the arguments emerging from various "schema theories".The present study was designed to assess the role that background knowledge plays in determining young children's ability to process relationships that are explicitly and fully specified in a text in comparison to those that are only partially specified by the same text. The study stems from the theoretical tradition of schema theory as explicated by Rumelhart and Ortony (1977), Rumelhart (in press) and Anderson (1977), as well as the research tradition established by Bransford and McCarrell (1973), Bransford and Johnson (1973), R. Anderson, Spiro, and M. Anderson (1977), and Anderson, Reynolds, Schauert, and Goetz (1977.Schema theory suggests that schemata serve at least two important functions during comprehension. First, they provide a framework for classifying concepts 202Journal of Reading Behavior presented in a text. Hence, the stronger the framework, the more likely concepts are to be classified and available for subsequent retrieval from long term memory. R. Anderson, Spiro. and M. Anderson (1977) found evidence for this generalization: Subjects who encountered certain items of food within a restaurant schema recalled those items better than subjects who encountered the same items within a grocery shopping schema. Bransford and Johnson (1973) found that subjects given a passage theme in the form of a title or a picture before reading an obscure passage recalled significantly more textually presented concepts than those not given a theme or given a theme after reading.Another corollary of this function is that concepts presented in text will be remembered as a function of the schema in which they are initially encoded into memory. Anderson et al. (1977) found that recall and comprehension of passages which invited two schematic interpretations (wrestling vs. a prison break or cardplaying vs. music rehearsal) was highly related to the background knowledge of the readers and/or environment in which the testing occurred. Physical educa...

Four classroom teachers provided instruction to improve the inferential comprehension of 40 good and poor 4th-grade readers, as determined by scores on the Stanford Achievement Test. The experimental treatment consisted of 3 parts: (a) making students aware of the importance of drawing inferences between new information and existing knowledge structures; (b) getting students to discuss, prior to reading, something they had done that was similar to the events in the text and to hypothesize what would happen in the text; and (c) providing students with many inferential questions to discuss after reading the selection. Results show that poor readers benefited significantly from the instruction, but good readers did not. This differential effect was attributed to the dissimilar aptitudes of good and poor readers and the dissimilar instructional methods that are used with good and poor readers in schools. Conclusions focus on the positive prospect of modeling successful instructional procedures on theoretical, basic research. (24 ref)

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This article examines six years of ethnographic research in Robyn Davis's pre-kindergarten classroom in the USA. Using a theoretical framework to embed writing within a social semiotic that is multimodal and has social intent (Street, 2003), the authors show how children used interactions during writing to create various written products. Three themes emerged from their findings: (1) interactions among children challenge their writing identities; (2) interactions among children introduce new possibilities in their writing; and (3) interactions among children with more knowledgeable peers help push writers forward with their writing acquisition. Through these findings, the authors conclude that peer interactions among four- and five-year-old children are influential in their writing processes and products.