Year: 1987
Type: article
Abstract: This study identified the inference strategies used by grade six readers reading three short narratives.Differences in strategy use were studied with reading proficiency and background knowledge varied.Eighty students comprised the sample, 40 low proficiency and 40 high proficiency readers.Equal numbers of students were randomly assigned to read either three familiar or three unfamiliar passages and to verbally report their thinking as they constructed interpretations.Qualitative and quantitative analyses showed that young readers' inference strategies appeared to be a decomposition of those used by adults as reported in the work of Collins, Brown, and Larkin (1980).Two observations were made from comparisons of young readers' strategy use.The first has to do with the importance of reading proficiency and the second with the relative insignificance of background knowledge in the absence of reading proficiency.It appears that reading proficiency may compensate in instances where there is insufficient background knowledge; however, whether a reader has sufficient background knowledge or not makes little difference in overall performance when the level of reading proficiency is low.Research ideas for a more detailed working out of the complexity of the inference process are offered. INFERENCE STRATEGIES IN READING COMPREHENSIONThe work by Collins, Brown, and Larkin (1980) with skilled adult readers is often cited on the topic of inference in text understanding.They state that in order to construct a model of the text, the comprehender must identify events in the story using different problem-solving methods, figure out the goals that those methods are being used to achieve, identify whether those methods succeed or fail, bind successes to satisfy preconditions for higher goals, and relate failures to alternative plans to achieve the same higher goals (p.387).This statement characterizes the complexity of the interacting processes involved in text comprehension.Based on the assumption that skilled adult readers know that they must do these kinds of things, it seems reasonable to wonder whether the adult strategies are used by skilled readers of a younger age.It might also be expected that readers of different levels of proficiency at any age level would utilize different strategies in comprehending texts.Proficient readers at a given age level are both more effective and more efficient than less proficient readers at that level in utilizing the textual information and their own experiences, whether it be in inference instantiation or the prediction of information (Goodman, 1973;Tierney, Bridge, & Cera, 1978-79;Schienbein, 1978;Wilson, 1979;Reder, 1980;Bos & Tierney, 1984).It would therefore seem likely that proficient grade six readers might not process text in the same manner as proficient adult readers, and that proficient and less proficient grade six readers might also process text differently.The adult inference strategies identified by Collins, Brown, and Larkin may represent an aggregate of processes which have become automatic for adult expert readers, just as word recognition is automatic for proficient readers but a challenging process.for beginning readers.This supposition, coupled with my experiences with young readers, motivated the following question: Are the inference strategies used by adults the same as those which are used by young readers?Specifically, this study explored the inference strategies used by grade six readers to see how they compared to those of skilled adult readers.In addition, in order to study the differences in inference strategy use within the same age level, both reading proficiency and degree of background knowledge of the grade six readers were varied.
Author: Linda M. Phillips
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W613094654