Submitted by: Debbie Shanks
In this article, Nathalie Cole and Susan R. Goldman investigate the think-aloud processes and the strategies students use when faced with expository text that has an unfamiliar subject. Think-alouds assist with understanding the processes that students use when presented with text that is not easily understood or involves a topic that is unfamiliar. Through think-alouds, researchers are provided with a better picture of the processing and steps readers engage in while reading.
Cole and Goldman looked at 16 sixth-grade elementary students ages 11 - 13. Students in the study read four passages; two mid-year and two at the end of the year. Two of the passages were somewhat familiar topics and two were less familiar topics. For each session, children were trained in the think-aloud procedure via short passages. Children were asked to verbalize what they were thinking as they read the passages, what they found hard in the passages and if they found the text hard, what they did to assist with the problem. Two of the less familiar text structures involved factors that affect metabolism and metabolic rate and hybrids and how they are helpful.
Cole and Coleman looked at the coding and analysis of five comprehension and reasoning strategies and processes that individuals use when coming across difficult text. The five categories are self-explanation, monitoring, paraphrasing, predicting, and associations.
*Self-explanation- when students worked at making sense out of what was being read not only through their prior knowledge, but also by using contextual information found within the text.
*Monitoring-when students were linking their understanding of the text they were reading and monitoring when sentences they encountered did not make sense with statements like “I get it” or “I didn’t know that.” . A subtest is also formed when students monitoring statements include things like “That sentence goes up there” , “That‘s strange“ or “They should put in _____.”
*Paraphrasing-when students not only strengthened their memory by repeating the words or phrases in the text in their own words, but also connected the new information to their prior knowledge.
*Predictions-when students made forward inferences or implications of what they expected would happen next in the text.
*Associations-when students made statements that had little to do with the text, like “I like carrots” when coming across the word within the text. Although these statements do not necessarily add to the understanding of the focal sentence, they may provide a link to the student’s prior knowledge.
Cole and Goldman found that self-explanation and monitoring/evaluation were most often used by students during their study. When dealing with expository text, Cole and Goldman found that students are often not accurate with predicting the information that will come next.
Cole and Goldman completed a second analysis of the think-alouds, and this time looked at the degree in which students were making connections among elements in the text and between text elements and prior knowledge. The researchers used the student’s verbalizations and the computer record of patterns of sentence accessing to categorized reinstatements into three types.
*Physical Reinstatements- through computer presentation, there was a record of the order in which students accessed and read the sentences in the passage. This provided researchers to distinguish between prior text that was physically reinstated as compared with mental reinstatement from memory without exposing the text information. The reading traces showed that many of the students spontaneously and selectively reinstated previously read sentences by exposing them physically.
*Mental Reinstatements-two types of mental reinstatement were identified through think-alouds.
*Mental-Text-when students reinstatements mentioned information previously presented in the text without physically uncovering the sentence.
*Mental-Student Generated-when prior knowledge of concepts and ideas related to the text information that the reader had verbalized on earlier focal sentences is linked to the physical reinstatements provided in the text.
The most frequent type of reinstatement was of information previously provided in the text. It is speculated that the data gleaned reflected that students were aware of the variations between the semantic and structural differences between the texts presented in this study.
Cole and Goldman then looked at the relationships between protocol event and reinstatements. Correlations of prior knowledge reinstatement and self-explanations suggests that students were making sense of new information with respect to known information and were creating representations integrated with prior knowledge (pg 668).
A look at individual protocols were then completed to investigate the correlations between various processing activities and students’ attempts to create logical representations. Four categories were established for this process. They are successful knowledge-building, less-successful knowledge building, text-focused processing, and minimalists.
*Successful Knowledge-Building- these students put a lot of effort into trying to make sense of the text. They used things like cause and effect explanations, elaborating, and cross-text integrative inferences that identified the macrostructure of the text.
*Less-Successful Knowledge-Building-these students also put forth a lot of effort to make sense of the text; however, their comments revealed that they were less successful in gaining coherent representations of what was read. These students were searching for a greater understanding of the text, but did not appear to receive it with the textual information provided.
*Text-Focused Processing-these students displayed various degrees of effort through paraphrasing, interpreting, questioning, bringing in examples, making affective evaluative comments, or monitoring, but they appeared to focus on individual sentences instead of the text as a whole to get the gist of what was being read.
*Minimalists-these students verbalized through half of the text, but didn’t really provide the information needed to truly understand what processes or strategies they were using to assist with understanding. Lack of motivation may have be present for this type of student.
The authors gleaned that the more likely a student was in attempting to find meaning of the text via many reinstatements and self-explanation, the more motivated they were as readers. Highly motivated students tended to use cognitive activities such as cause and effect reasoning, using personal experience of prior knowledge to elaborate, making and testing hypotheses, asking for more information, and interpreting sentences. Looking at individual protocols allowed the researchers to analyze the strategies each type of reader displayed when using the think-aloud processes.
Cole and Goldman conclude that elementary students use a wide range of approaches when reading difficult expository text. Students often use the same approaches to read expository text as they do to read story text. Due to this, when reading expository text, young readers are not able to glean as much relevant information to assist with truly understanding the various underlying relationships among the concepts of expository texts. Although self-monitoring is important to the understanding of expository text, unless readers actively apply strategies to resolve the problems they identify when reading, they are likely to end up with fragmented representation of what has been read. Think-alouds provide researchers with relevant information to assist with understanding the various processes that students take when presented with various text structure. In doing so, researchers are provided with a better picture of the processing and steps readers engage in while reading.
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