Reason Inferences in the Story Comprehension of Children and Adults

The role of comprehension monitoring in Children's revision

“…Converging results were obtained by Casteel (1993) in a study that utilized much longer text materials. Ackerman (1985Ackerman ( , 1988 also found that second graders were much less likely than older children to modify an initial interpretation in order to resolve inconsistencies between material presented at the beginning and end of a passage. Thus, there appears to be a developmental shift in the mid-elementary school years in the detection of alternative interpretations in text.…”

“…Initially, most studies of comprehension monitoring and revision utilized texts that contained inconsistencies, anomalies, and unexplained gaps (Ackerman, 1988;August et al, 1984;Baker and Anderson, 1982;Beal, 1990a;Garner and Anderson, 1982;Markman, 1979;Schmidt et al, 1984;Zabrucky and Ratner, 1986). These types of text problems are not necessarily representative of the types of comprehension problems that readers typically encounter; it is unlikely that many writers, even novices, would produce texts that contain frequent examples of blatantly contradictory or highly anomalous sentences.…”

Environmental, cognitive, and metacognitive influences on text revision: Assessing the evidence

“…Different kinds of inferences are made during reading of narrative and expository texts (Ackerman, 1988;Graesser et al, in press). For example, a murder mystery may require readers to infer the spatial layout of a house, whereas a physics textbook may require logical or symbolic inferences (Graesser and Kreuz, 1993).…”

“…For example, Beal (1990;Beal and Belgrad, 1990) has found that one reason younger children do not detect comprehension problems is that once they construct an internal representation of the text, they do not clearly identify the inferences and assumptions that contributed to its construction. When inferences and assumptions are not identified, monitoring and controlling discrepancies between a writer's or reader's interpretations of a text and the actual text are more difficult, as is the reinterpretation of the text when new information is encountered (Ackerman, 1988). Moreover, writers and readers will not revise problematic text when their interpretations of it are so consistent and coherent that they have no sense of dissonance to alert them to problems requiring revision (Beal, 1990;Beal and Belgrad, 1990;Fitzgerald and Markham, 1987).…”

“…Do the kinds of inferences made to detect meaning problems (Ackerman, 1988;Graesser et al, in press;Zabrucky and Ratner, 1992) vary across genres? Does extensive practice revising texts of one genre generalize to the revi5Our reading of research reports for this review suggests that the following investigators have worked programatieally to study revision: Beal, Berninger, Butterfield, Daneman, Englert, Fitzgerald, Kellogg, MacArthur, and McCutchen. sion of other genres?…”