readers use the information from a text and their prior knowledge in answering comprehension questions? In other words, where do children's answers to comprehension questions come from, and how is it possible to discover whether children draw inferences from information in a text, as opposed to relying on their prior knowledge and experiences outside of it? Such questions were motivated by previous research (e.g., Nicholson and Imlach, 1981; Lipson, 1982, 1983) that shows that children may produce incorrect responses in comprehension tasks because they trust their own prior knowledge and experiences more than what the text states. In order to explore these issues, a series of four studies was conducted in which children between 7 and 8 years-old were asked to read narrative and informative texts and answer different types of comprehension question about these texts. After each response, they were asked to explain how they derived their responses by answering the following question: "how do you know this answer?" The children's answers and justifications were analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The analysis of the data showed that the text proved to be the main source of information for the young readers, i.e. most of their comprehension responses were derived from text data. However, nearly all of the children responded to a few questions exclusively on the basis of their prior knowledge, ignoring information in the text. Overall, the problem of overuse of prior knowledge was greater after reading texts that contained ideas that conflicted with the children's general expectations or prior topic knowledge than after reading conventional texts where this conflict was not apparent. In addition, a great variety of problems in using text information were also identified, particularly in response to gap-filling questions (the ones that require searching for cues in the text and integrating these cues with background knowledge). Finally, in all the studies, there was a positive correlation between the quality of the children's justifications of their responses and their comprehension skills. A fifth study, where the children judged the quality of other children's explanations for their responses, revealed that explanations that were correctly based on information from the text and explanations that were only based on the reader's prior knowledge were perceived as equally good. This finding indicated that young readers are not fully aware of the essential relationship between text information, comprehension questions and the reader's prior knowledge. The final study demonstrated that, although young readers seem to be sensitive to the existence of different types of comprehension question, they do not have a great deal of knowledge of these differences. The results also showed that this knowledge has a positive correlation with their performance in question-answering tasks. The procedure of asking children to justify their answers was shown to be a good way of specifying more precisely some of their problems in text comprehension. It also seemed to encourage them to look back at the text and review their responses and, as such it could be considered a useful tool to improve children's reading comprehension
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:401487 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Creators | Brandao, Ana Carolina Perrusi Alves |
| Publisher | University of Sussex |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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