Characters and clues: Factors affecting children’s extension of knowledge through integration of separate episodes

Abstract

Children build up knowledge about the world and also remember individual episodes. How individual episodes during which children learn new things become integrated with one another to form general knowledge is only beginning to be explored. Integration between separate episodes is called on in educational contexts and in everyday life as a major means of extending knowledge and organizing information. Bauer and San Souci (2010) provided an initial demonstration that 6-year-olds extend their knowledge by integrating between separate but related episodes; the episodes shared a high level of surface similarity. Experiments 1A and 1B of the current research were tests of integration under low and high levels of surface similarity, respectively. In Experiment 1A, when surface similarity of the episodes was low, 6-year-olds integrated between passages of text, yet their performance was not as robust as observed previously. In Experiment 1B, when surface similarity of the episodes was high, a replication of Bauer and San Souci’s results was observed. In Experiment 2, we tested whether a “hint” to consult the information learned in the passages improved performance even when surface level similarity was low. The hint had a strong facilitating effect. Possible mechanisms of integration between separate yet related episodes are discussed.

Children’s integration of information across texts: reading processes and knowledge representations

“…This is in line with what has been observed in adults, using the same paradigm (Beker et al, 2016), and in older children (aged 11-13), using think-aloud methods (Wolfe & Goldman, 2005). The present results extend previous findings by showing, using an unobtrusive measure, that integration across texts occurs spontaneously during reading (Bauer et al, 2012(Bauer et al, , 2015Bauer & San Souci, 2010;Wolfe & Goldman, 2005). Although the current results seem to conflict with previous studies that showed that children particularly struggled with integrating information across texts (Sabatini et al, 2014;Sheehan et al, 2006), there are important differences between the current study and previous studies that may explain the seemingly contradictory conclusions.…”

“…It has been argued that learning from multiple texts may be difficult for children, for example when children do not recognize the relatedness of the texts (Bauer et al, 2012;Kurby et al, 2005), when the distance between the texts is large (Beker et al, 2016), or when children are taught to process texts in isolation from other texts (Hartman & Hartman, 1994). However, the results of the current study suggest that upper elementary school children are capable of processing texts in relation to other texts, and that they can do so spontaneously, without explicit prompting.…”

“…A first line of research concerns integration across texts by very young children, using auditorily presented texts (Bauer, King, Larkina, Varga, & White, 2012;Bauer & San Souci, 2010;Bauer, Varga, King, Nolen, & White, 2015). Bauer and colleagues had children aged 4-6 listen to story pairs that each included one stem fact (e.g., "groups of dolphins are called pods", "dolphins communicate by clicking and squeaking").…”

Semantic Elaboration through Integration: Hints Both Facilitate and Inform the Process

“…When the children were exposed to both passages of text in the same session but then experienced a 1-week delay before the test for integration (before-test delay), level of self-generation of new knowledge was only 21%. Six-year-olds' self-generation of new knowledge also is depressed when the level of surface similarity between separate passages of text is low (Bauer, King, Larkina, Varga, & White, 2012). That is, when the character who learned a novel fact in one passage of text was different from the character who learned a novel fact in the related passage (e.g., a ladybug and a lizard), the level of self-generation of new knowledge through integration fell substantially, relative to when the same character SELF-GENERATION THROUGH INTEGRATION learned both facts (i.e., 40% compared with 67%).…”

“…Accordingly, in the present research, we tested whether hints to integrate related episodes of text facilitated self-generation performance in 4-and 6-year-old children. As described, Bauer et al (2012) provided an initial test of the efficacy of hints for 6-year-olds. The test was limited, however, by virtue of the fact that the ''hint'' both made reference to the source children should consult to help them answer the question (i.e., consult the stories) and directed the children to ''think.''…”