Postreading question–answer interactions and children's learning from text.

Processes in Reading Comprehension and the Teaching of Comprehension

“…Schema inference students produced more extrapassage propositions in their recalls; text implicit students produced more intrapassage connecting propositions. Similar results were also reported by Wixson (1983bWixson ( , 1984 and Kormos (1983), who found that text implicit and schema inference adjunct questions led to more inference propositions in recall. In a followup analysis, Kormos (1984) found that the type of adjunct question interacted with the type of story schema.…”

Postpassage Questions: Task and Reader Effects on Comprehension and Metacomprehension Processes

“…However, the three-way interaction effect suggests that observed changes in perceived comprehension were attributed only to constructed-response items (most notably under the no-lookback condition); answering selected-response questions (with or without lookbacks) did not modify subjects'initial estimates of text comprehension. Although recently it has been shown that postpassage questions can induce processing that would otherwise not oCcur (Wixson, 1983), this may be the case only for constructedresponse item formats. Findings from this study suggest further that these particular types of questions may cue readers' awareness of points of inadequate comprehension, resulting in lowered overall metacomprehension ratings.…”

“…Of course, it could also be the case that readers adjusted their estimates of comprehension after responding to constructed-response items due to the greater difficulties involved in producing acceptable written responses. Further research might well consider the processes by which responding to constructed response item types modifies both passage understandings (Wixson, 1983) and selfevaluations of text comprehension.…”

Helping learners construct knowledge

“…Rather, language is a code the learner uses in interaction with existing schemata to construct meanings and knowledge. Empirical support for the schema-theoretic view is provided by a variety of sources including the work on perspective in interpreting stories (e.g., Anderson and Pichert, 1978) and by work on schema-based elaboration in learning (Pearson and Johnson, 1978;Wixson, 1983;Raphael, 1984). The latter work is particularly interesting because it demonstrates that even young learners can be taught to actively relate text information to their existing schemata and thereby increase their degree of comprehension or meaning construction.…”