The origin of centrality deficit in text memory and comprehension by poor comprehenders: a think-aloud study

Abstract

The present study employed a think-aloud method to explore the origin of a centrality deficit (i.e., poor recall of central ideas) found in poor comprehenders (PC). Moreover, utilizing the diverse think-aloud responses, we examined the overall quality of text processing employed by PC during reading, in order to shed more light on the cognitive underpinnings underlying their poor comprehension and memory after reading. To address these goals, adolescents with good and poor comprehension, matched on reading (decoding) skills, were asked to state aloud whatever comes to their mind during the reading of two expository texts. After reading, the participants freely recalled text ideas and answered multiple-choice questions on the texts. Results indicated that PC exhibited lower performance than good comprehenders (GC) on the recall and comprehension tasks. The think-aloud protocols indicated that PC generated fewer responses than GC that reflect high-level, deep text processing, and more responses that reflect low-level, surface text processing. Furthermore, compared to GC, PC reinstated fewer prior text ideas, with this reduction being significantly greater for central than for peripheral ideas. Finally, the proportions of deep processing responses in general were positively associated with participants' performance on recall and comprehension tasks. These findings suggest that PC exhibit poor text comprehension and memory, particularly of central ideas, because they construct a low-quality, poorly-connected text representation during reading, and produce fewer, less-elaborated retrieval cues for subsequent text comprehension and memory. This explanation is further illuminated in the context of previous findings and theoretical accounts.

The effect of practice and expectancy of inferential questions on poor comprehenders' inferential processing and monitoring

“…Previous intervention studies, which instructed poor comprehenders about how and when to generate inferences during reading, improved their performance on inferential questions (e.g., Yuill & Oakhill, 1988). Consistently, think‐aloud studies have shown that poor comprehenders tend to employ less efficient processing strategies such as paraphrasing each idea separately, rather than more efficient strategies such as connecting ideas to each other and/or to prior knowledge, as good comprehenders tend to employ (e.g., Seipel et al, 2017; Yeari & Lantin, 2021). There is also a possibility that requesting poor comprehenders to monitor their comprehension level and predict their success on subsequent questions as a secondary task, reduced the cognitive resources available for executing an appropriate text processing plan for the primary task.…”

EFL Pre-service Teachers' Open Internet Reading Processing and Its Implication for Teaching: A Guided Think-Aloud Study

“…The designs of those studies allowed the research participants to verbalize their limited set of strategic actions because of the narrowed Internet access provided by the researchers through hyperlinks and uploaded reading questions, materials, and sources. Such designs differ from an open-ended Internet reading space, which is more dynamic and involves complex situations such as: defining information, using keywords, scanning and evaluating webpages, processing and answering Internet reading tasks (Argelagos & Pifarré, 2012;Dinet et al, 2012;Hinostroza et al, 2018;Timpe-Laughlin et al, 2021;Yeari & Lantin, 2021).…”

“…The unguided think-aloud protocol might cause biased interpretations and findings because every reader has different strategies. In this study, the researcher combined several Internet reading frameworks from different experts to understand the information problem, use a search engine and find keywords, scan, evaluate, and select information, and integrate the information to construct an answer during Internet reading aloud activities (Argelagos & Pifarré, 2012;Dinet et al, 2012;Hinostroza et al, 2018;Yeari & Lantin, 2021). Those five processes were then coached to participants before the interventions were conducted.…”