Chapter 28

Chapter 28
“Self-Regulated Comprehension During Normal Reading”
Douglas J. Hacker writes about the importance of readers using metacognition skills for reading comprehension. The purpose of reading is to construct meaning. When the construction of meaning fails to fit the reader’s interpretation, comprehension fails. The purpose of Hacker’s research is to propose a standardization in terminology, describe a cognitive-metacognitive model of self-regulated comprehension, and explore the possibility of limits to how much readers can monitor and control their own comprehension and overcoming this limit through dialogue with other readers.
• Hacker begins by defining terms used in discussing comprehension. Cognitive psychologist - metamemory for text or metacomprehension. This concept refers to reader’s predictions of comprehension with actual performance on comprehension question. Readers with highly correlated predictions and performance have good calibration of comprehension; those with poor correlation have poor metacomprehension. Educational psychologists- comprehension monitoring. Readers detect and resolve textual errors through the use of the error-detection paradigm. If they resolve all or most of the errors, they have good comprehension, if not, poor comprehension results.
• Hacker describes Flavell’s 1979 model of cognitive monitoring in which monitoring occurs through four classes of phenomena: metacognitive knowledge- person’s stored world knowledge; metacognitive experiences- awareness of cognitive or affective processes and is progress being made toward the goal (to abandon or make new ones); goals, and strategies. Flavell’s model has declarative (strategic demands of tasks and one’s limits and strengths as a problem solver) and procedural (monitoring and regulating ongoing cognition). Hacker continues discussing Nelson and Narens 1990 model that integrates the declarative aspects of Flavell’s model. Their model contains three principles of splitting the processes into two levels. But they do make a distinction between cognition and metacognition in which cognition is knowledge of world and strategies for using that knowledge and metacognition as monitoring, controlling, and understanding knowledge and strategies.
• Hacker continues by describing theoretical mechanisms of comprehensive monitoring. Comprehension is the process through which understanding is a consequence of the construction of an internal representing of text.
o Verbal representation of words and syntactical units (phrases, sentences, paragraphs)
o Verbal representation in semantic units (text propositions)
o Representation of the overall gist of the text (used to modify all previously constructed levels or levels yet to be constructed)
When reading, readers set certain goals. If the readers fail to meet their goal, they have to be prepared to failure at all levels of text representation. Why did it happen? Readers then select strategies when there are excessive demands on comprehension. Strategies help lessen demands on working memory. Examples of monitoring strategies are: rereading, looking back to prior text, predicting, comparing two or more propositions. Examples of control strategies are: summarizing text information, clarifying information by using reference sources, correcting incomplete or inaccurate text information. The external text base element of the model is represented internally within the comprehension process through processing of the external text. This base serves as linguistic input to comprehension; the reader can then modify the external text base if necessary. Hacker then points out that failure to comprehend is due to a failure to monitor comprehension or a failure to control comprehension.
• Hacker goes on to describe self-regulation in operation. Metacognitive models include prior knowledge, their reading goals, understanding the author’s intent, understanding text propositions, and understanding the ways knowledge from the text integrate with their own knowledge, Kintsch’s situation model of the text. Readers monitor the similarities and differences between what their cognitive representation is and their metacognitive models by applying standards of evaluation. Similarities serve as indicators that comprehension is happening. Differences are indicators that comprehension has fail. But if readers are unaware of these indicators, monitoring of comprehension does not occur. If differences were monitored, the reader would have a sense of confusion and correct the source.
• As Hacker continues his discussion of comprehension, he reiterates that reading is a process that involves a mental representation in memory with the goal of understanding the text. And because each reader builds and different representation of what has been read, goals and meaning may differ yet there will be n agreement on the major features of the constructed representations of text. Authors work to accomplish this by writing for a specific audience. Readers then constrain their constructions by using key propositions or ‘macropropositions’ that are contained within the topic sentences of each paragraph. This has been identified as a strategic process that is typical of what good comprehenders do. But if readers hold too strongly to prior knowledge, it can cause the readers to ignore textual information that contradicts the readers’ beliefs. This causes a failure to detect textual contradictions in their monitoring and results in an imbalance between what readers believe and what they actually read. Readers with small working memory will have constraints on comprehension. And when text can have multiple interpretations, the demands on working memory may limit the resources necessary to construct those alternative interpretations.
• Normal comprehension problems that leave reader with ‘illusions of knowing’:
o Failure to amend current understanding in light of new information
o Skimming over unfamiliar words
o Incorrect inferences
o Failure to compare information with prior with prior knowledge
o Failure to encode key information
o Forgetting key information
o Failure to identify main propositions
o Failure to understand but continues reading hoping that understanding will eventually occur
• Reading comprehension is the link between meaning and interpretation. Problems occur with ambiguity of words and their meanings. Interpretations are strongly influenced by the reader’s knowledge. The text itself may contain information however, that may amend the reader’s knowledge thereby providing feedback for further constructions. Therefore, reading is interactive.
• To increase interaction, encouragement of questioning and focusing attention on meanings at the inference level which can provide a broader spectrum; think-alouds elicit metacognitive monitoring; engagement in dialogue with other readers. This dialogue allows readers’ understandings to merging with other readers and their understandings.