active comprehension: teaching a process of reading comprehension and its effects on reading...

Active Comprehension: Teaching a Process of Reading Comprehension and Its Effects onReading AchievementAuthor(s): Ruth Yopp Nolte and Harry SingerSource: The Reading Teacher, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Oct., 1985), pp. 24-31Published by: Wiley on behalf of the International Reading AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20198994 .

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Active comprehension: Teaching a process of reading comprehension and its effects on reading achievement

Teaching fourth and fifth graders to ask themselves questions about key points in a story significantly improved their perform ance on tests about story content.

Ruth Yopp Nolte

Harry Singer

The current method of trying to im

prove students' comprehension is for teachers to ask questions and have stu

dents answer them (Durkin, 1979,

1984; Singer, 1978). This practice em

phasizes teacher perspective of what content is important, teacher selected

objectives, and teacher evaluation of

reading products. When teachers ask students ques

tions before or after they read and

evaluate only their answers, they are

stressing only the product of compre hension; they are not teaching students a process of comprehending text. Al

though some students may learn to im

itate teacher-posed questions, a more

direct way for students to acquire this

process is by having them learn to ask

24 The Reading Teacher October 1985

their own questions before, during, and after reading (Singer, 1978). This

process during reading is analogous to a question and answer dialogue be tween the reader and the text.

In short, active comprehension is a

process of generating questions throughout reading. In this process, the student establishes the goal, deter

mines what content is important, gen erates questions, and searches for answers to them. Active comprehen

sion instruction places the locus of

control in the students (DeCharms, 1976) and enables them to learn a

process of reading that will help them to achieve self-defined goals.

Using story grammar to generate questions

The purpose of this study was to find out whether teaching active compre hension as a process does improve 9



and 10 year olds' reading. This instruc tion emphasizes training students to ask their own questions before, dur

ing, and after reading stories. This in struction should include training in

what kinds of questions to ask, since

posing irrelevant questions may result in low comprehension (Donlan and

Singer, 1979). Students must also know something about what they are

reading in order to ask questions (Mi yak? and Norman, 1979).

Since students as early as first grade already know story grammar (Mandler and Johnson, 1977) they are not likely to benefit from traditional story gram

mar instruction (Dreher and Singer, 1980). But we reasoned that students

can learn to use their story grammar knowledge to generate their own ques tions while reading a narrative. More

over, they can learn to transform their

story grammar structures into story specific questions, which then direct and focus their perception of relevant

segments of the text that contain infor mation for answering their questions and filling in the slots in their story grammar structures (Singer and

Donlan, 1982). Thus, students can use their story grammar knowledge to gen erate questions that focus on central

story content.

In an earlier study with third grad ers, Beck, Omanson, and McKeown

(1982) found that the relationship of

questions to story content is critical in

enhancing comprehension. Teachers asked relevant questions at pertinent points in the story, highlighting the central content, and this combination of relevant questions on central content did enhance children's understanding of the texts. However, no transfer or

maintenance test was given. In the present study, we used the

same technique of asking questions at

pertinent points, but consistent with the concept of active comprehension,

we used a phase-out technique (Singer and Donlan, 1980) for teaching stu

dents to generate their own questions at these points.

Our research goals were (1) to deter mine whether instructing fourth and fifth graders in active comprehension

would result in comprehension supe rior to that of a typical control group for passages on which students were

trained, and (2) to determine whether the children learned to transfer this ac tive comprehension process to other

passages.

Active comprehension instruction Instruction in active comprehension began on the first day. The teacher re viewed story grammar for the students and discussed the importance of asking appropriate questions. Then she di rected the students' comprehension of a

story by modeling appropriate ques tions. The students silently read a par agraph or two at a time and the teacher intervened with questions at pertinent points that were consistent with story grammar structure. These included

questions about the setting, main char

acter, his or her goal, and obstacles en countered on the way to achieving or not achieving that goal. These ques tions involved information that was central to the story content.

This modeling of questions took

place for approximately half of a 40 minute period. For the remainder of the period, the students were directed to try to ask their own questions as

they finished the story silently. Then

they were given a 15 item multiple choice comprehension test.

After this introduction, a four-step procedure of phasing out the teacher and phasing in the students was used to train students to ask their own ques tions during reading. This procedure

was followed on 10 successive school

days, with a story for each day fol lowed immediately by a comprehen sion test.

On the first day, the teacher worked with the whole group. She began to

Active comprehension 25



Group raw score means on daily tests and transfer test*

17

16H

15

14-1

13

12

11H

10

9

8H

7

6

5

4-I

3 I 2-I

1

228 Experimental

group

i i i i i i i i i i

1 23456789 10

Tests

Transfer test

* Means for raw scores are indicated. The results could also be depicted in the form of standard scores. The graph would look about the same, but differences would be exaggerated.

phase herself out and phase in the stu

dents by asking the students questions that required a question in response, such as "What would you like to know

about what happens next?" (Singer, 1978). Throughout, the appropriate

ness of questions to central story con

tent was emphasized. The teacher

worked with the whole class in this manner for 3 days.

Over the next 3 days, the teacher

phased herself out further by dividing the class into groups of five or six chil

dren. One student was chosen to chair each group and elicit questions from

the others while the teacher circulated around the room.


Next, the students worked in pairs, asking each other questions as they read, and, finally, students worked in

dependently, asking their own ques tions before, during, and after reading.

Typical reading instruction for

comprehension Instruction for the control group was

based on Durkin's (1979) classroom observations of reading instruction, where almost no direct instruction of

comprehension occurred. Instead,

teachers devoted the majority of class time to assessment. Teacher-posed

questions dominated and the major concern was whether students' answers



Readability levels of the stories and group means and standard deviations on the comprehension tests

Test Readability

level

Active

comprehension

group

Mean S.D.

Control group

Mean S.D.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Transfer

fifth sixth sixth sixth fourth

fifth sixth fourth seventh

seventh

seventh

11.53

10.84

9.95

10.68

12.89

12.78

15.94

14.24

14.76

12.00

12.28

2.03

2.58

3.58

2.15

1.65

2.94

2.57

3.47

2.43

3.61

2.77

9.8

10.39

9.56

9.9

11.62

13.3

13.24

12.6

9.38

7.86

9.9

2.65

3.08

3.00

2.81

2.06

2.78

4.60

3.58

3.21

2.85

2.34

2.22

.48

.35

.99

2.15

.55

2.14

1.4

5.57

3.87

2.8

.05

.05

.05

.001

.001

.01

were right or wrong. Typical previews of stories were brief; mostly they con

sisted of an introduction to new vocab

ulary in which the teachers often only identified the words instead of defining them. Then the teachers posed two or three questions prior to the students

reading the story. A similar procedure was followed

for our control group: The teacher wrote difficult words on the chalk board each day and pronounced them for students, asked a question about the story, had the students read the

story silently, and gave a comprehen sion test.

Transfer test At the end of the training and testing, we wanted to see whether students who had been given instruction in active

comprehension would show superior comprehension of a passage on which

they did not have training. That is, would any beneficial effects of this

training carry over to a new passage? To test this, both groups were given a transfer test. No instruction in ques tioning or participation in questioning activities occurred on this day. Both

groups were given 30 minutes to read a

story and complete the 20 item test.

Experimental design Forty-three fourth and fifth graders from two classrooms were randomly

assigned to the two instructional

groups. Scores from students who missed more than 2 days of instruction were eliminated from the data analy sis. This resulted in a final sample of 40 subjects, 19 in the active compre hension treatment group and 21 in the control group.

Instruction took place over 10 con secutive school days. The two groups

met with the same teacher (who was not a teacher in that school district) in

separate 40 minute periods. During these periods, students received the results of the previous day's testing, participated in the instructional strat

egy, and were tested on the new story. Narrative selections of approxi

mately 1,500 words were taken from the fifth through seventh grade levels of the Reader's Digest Reading Skills Builders series (1977). Stories from the fifth and sixth grade levels were

randomly assigned to the first 8 days of treatment. The three selections from the seventh grade books were ran

domly assigned to the final 2 days of treatment and to the transfer test. This enabled students to learn the strategies




on easier material before applying them to more difficult material. We constructed 15 item multiple choice tests for the stories. Because two or

three students earned very high scores on the fourth and fifth tests, 20 item tests were constructed for subsequent stories. We hoped to eliminate any

ceiling effect.

Results Means for both groups for each test are

shown in the Figure. On the first day of instruction, when appropriate ques tions were modeled by the teacher in the active comprehension group, a sig nificant difference between group

means was observed. This result sup

ports Beck, Omanson, and McKeown's

(1982) finding that when a teacher asks relevant questions at pertinent story grammar junctures as the class reads the story, the students' compre

hension for that story is enhanced.

Group means for the next 5 days fol low each other closely, most of them

being less than a point apart. In fact,

they tend to rise and fall together with the readability of the passages (see Ta

ble). These data confirm that the two

groups were comparable at the begin

ning of instruction in active compre hension. On the 7th day of instruction, a significant difference of approxi

mately two and a half points is found between groups in favor of the active

comprehension group. Although this difference decreases on the next day, it increases to approximately five points on the final 2 days of training.

The means for number correct on

the transfer test are also shown in the

Figure. Students in the active compre hension group averaged 12.28 correct, and students in the control group aver

aged 9.9 correct (t =

2.8,/?<.01).

Training improves comprehension The data show that not only does

teaching students the process of active

comprehension enhance comprehen


sion on those passages which are used in training, but that there is a general effect. Students who learned active

comprehension as a process of reading

outperformed those in the control

group on the transfer test. The effect of

training began to appear consistently on the 7th of 10 days of training.

These results are supported by other research on self-questioning. Frase

and Schwartz (1975) found that stu dents who studied by asking each other

questions achieved better than students who were directed to read and reread the text. However, Frase and Schwartz did not attempt to teach their students

any systematic way of generating their own questions. The same is true of the Helfeldt and Lalik (1976) study in which it was found that students who

participated in reciprocal student teacher questioning outperformed those who only answered teacher

posed questions. Andr? and Anderson (1979) and

Weiner (1978) did provide self-ques tioning training as a study technique to

high school and fifth grade students re

spectively in their studies and found that trained questioners outperformed untrained questioners on comprehen sion measures. In neither of these stud

ies, though, was a transfer or

maintenance test given to determine

whether there was general improve ment in comprehension as a result of

learning a strategy for self-question ing. Cohen (1983) created special ma

terials to train third graders to ask their own literal questions and after 6 days of treatment administered a criterion test. She concluded that young chil

dren can learn to generate questions about stories. Furthermore, a stand

ardized comprehension test was given before and after training and the results show significant gains for the

experimental group. Students in her

study, however, were taught only to ask

questions after reading, not before or

during reading.



Palincsar's (1984) strategy for im

proving comprehension of expository material involved four monitoring/foc using activities: self-questioning, sum

marizing, predicting, and clarifying. Instruction involved an interactive dia

log between the teacher and a group of

students in which the teacher modeled the four activities for a segment of the text before students took turns asking a

question about the next segment, pro

viding a summary, making a predic tion, and discussing difficult phrases that needed clarification. Significant growth was seen in students receiving this training on novel passages given daily and on a delayed test.

These findings support our research, which indicates that students can be

taught a process of comprehension that will affect their general reading ability.

Our study differs from Palincsar's in two important ways, however. First,

we narrowed the focus to one activity, self-questioning. Second, we did not

rely only on modeling and feedback as

Palincsar did; we gave students direct instruction in appropriate questioning.

That is, we taught them to use their

knowledge of story grammar structure to generate questions at relevant points in the story.

Direct instruction Active comprehension instruction is also consistent with our knowledge that learning is more likely to occur

when instruction is direct. Current in struction in comprehension does not

rely on direct instruction; it depends on transfer of training. Teachers as

sume that in asking students questions, they will stimulate students' thinking about their reading and this stimula tion will somehow result in students'

improvement in comprehension. Some teachers may even think of

their questions as models for students to emulate, and some students may

learn to imitate the teacher and through this type of transfer of training they

will acquire a process of comprehen sion. However, teachers don't usually

teach for such transfer of learning pro

gressing from teacher-posed questions to having the students ask their own

questions. In contrast, active comprehension as

an instructional strategy does not rely on transfer. Students are directly taught to generate their own questions before, during, and after reading. And because students are more likely to be

ego-involved in their own questions, they are more likely to exert effort in

processing the text to get the answers to their questions.

This processing effort facilitates transfer of information gleaned from the text into long-term memory (An derson and Biddle, 1975; Craik and

Lockhart, 1972; Kolers, 1981). There

fore, students are more likely to re

member and use the information

gained from the text. Their reward for such self-directed learning is satisfac tion of their own curiosity.

Metacognition Further justification for active com

prehension instruction and explanation of its attainment of superior compre

hension are that active comprehension instruction also develops students' me

tacognition or awareness of their own

thought processes. In other words, es

tablishing goals, selecting means to

them, and confirming attainment of

goals improves and requires students to use their metacognitve capacities and processes. These capacitites and

processes consist of knowing what you know, what means to select to achieve a goal, when to mobilize or activate a

particular strategy or schema, how to

analyze and fix up errors or difficulties

encountered, and how to evaluate pro

gress for attaining a goal (Brown, 1981;Flavell, 1981).

Thus, in learning active comprehen

sion, students are gaining knowledge and developing their ability to regulate




and monitor their cognitive processes and evaluate the outcomes. Further

more, metacognitive ability enables them to know what they need to learn and what kinds of strategies to acti vate.

Moreover, in this active process of

reading, students' self-generated ques tions continually focus their attention on relevant aspects of the text as they shift from question to answer, and back to question again to repeat the

process as they read. In short, their

thinking during active comprehension is continually goal-directed and orga nized. Hence, they are less likely to

daydream while they are ostensibly reading.

Conclusion Current instructional practice focuses on the product of comprehension. Stu dents read, teachers ask questions, and

students answer them. Little emphasis is placed on direct instruction of a

process of comprehension, although some authors have advocated self

questioning as an aid to comprehen sion.

We have found that when students are taught a process of comprehension by having the teacher model questions at pertinent points in a story, then

phase out teacher questions and phase in students' self-questioning, the stu

dents' comprehension is enhanced, maintained, and transferred to a novel

story.

Self-questioning, thus, is not some

thing to do before reading or after

reading, or as an aid to reading. It is a

process of reading that enables stu

dents to become independent in how to

understand a story and that results in

comprehension superior to traditional

comprehension instruction. The in

struction and the process of reading is known as active comprehension.

Nolte teaches fifth grade in the Brea Olinda Unified School District and is a


graduate student at the University of California, Riverside. Singer teaches courses in the psychology and peda gogy of reading, also at the University of California, Riverside. This article is a combination of two papers presented at the International Reading Associa tion's Tenth World Congress, Hong

Kong, August 1984: "Active Compre hension: Its Philosophy, Psychology, and Instruction" by Harry Singer and 'Active Comprehension: Does the Shift

from Answering Teacher-Posed to Stu dent-Generated Questions Improve Comprehension ?"by Ruth Nolte.

References Anderson, Richard, and W. Barry Biddle. "On Asking Peo

ple Questions about What They Are Reading." In Psy chology of Learning and Motivation, vol. 9, edited by Gordon Bower, pp. 89-132. New York, N.Y.: Academic Press, 1975.

Andr?, Marli E.D.A., and Thomas Anderson. "The Devel opment and Evaluation of a Self-Questioning Study Technique." Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 4

(1979). pp. 605-23. Beck, Isabel, Richard Omanson, and Margaret McKeown.

"An Instructional Redesign of Reading Lessons: Ef fects on Comprehension." Reading Research Quar terly, vol. 17, no. 4 (1982), pp. 462-81.

Brown, Ann. "Metacognition: The Development of Selec tive Attention Strategies for Learning from Texts." In Di rections in Reading: Research and Instruction, edited

by Michael Kamil, pp. 21-43. Thirtieth Yearbook of the National Reading Conference. Washington, D.C: Na tional Reading Conference, 1981.

Cohen, Ruth. "Self-Generated Questions as an Aid to

Reading Comprehension." The Reading Teacher, vol. 36 (April 1983), pp. 770-75.

Craik, Fergus, and Robert Lockhart. "Levels of Process

ing: A Framework for Memory Research." Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, vol. 11 (Decem ber 1982), pp. 671-84.

DeCharms, Richard. Enhancing Motivation: A Change in the Classroom. New York, N.Y.: Irvington Publishers, 1976.

Donlan, Dan, and Harry Singer. "Active Comprehension of Short Stories." In Reading in Education: A Broader View, edited by Malcolm Douglas, pp. 175-84. Forty third Yearbook of the Claremont Reading Conference.

Claremont, Calif.: The Claremont Reading Confer ence, 1979.

Dreher, Mariam J., and Harry Singer. "Story Grammar In struction Unnecessary for Intermediate Grade Stu dents." The Reading Teacher, vol. 33 (December 1980), pp. 261-68.

Durkin, Dolores. "What Classroom Observations Reveal about Reading Comprehension." Reading Research

Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 4 (1979), pp. 481-533. Durkin, Dolores. "Is There a Match between What Ele

mentary Teachers Do and What Basal Reader Manuals Recommend?" The Reading Teacher, vol. 38 (April 1984), pp. 734-44.

Flavell, John. "Cognitive Monitoring." In Children's Oral Communication Skills, edited by W. Patrick Dickson, pp. 35-60. New York, N.Y.: Academic Press, 1981.

Frase, Lawrence T., and Barry J. Schwartz. "Effect of Question Production on Prose Recall." Journal of Edu cational Psychology, vol. 67 (October 1975), pp. 628 35.



Helfeldt, John P., and Rosary Lalik. "Reciprocal Student Teacher Questioning." The Reading Teacher, vol. 30

(December 1976), pp. 283-87. Kolers, Paul. Colloquium presented at Pomona College,

Claremont College, Claremont, California, Spring 1981.

Mandler, Jean M., and Nancy S. Johnson. "Remembrance of Things Parsed: Story Structure and Recall." Cogni tive Psychology, vol. 9 (January 1977), pp. 111-51.

Miyake, Naomi, and Donald Norman. "To Ask a Question, One Must Know Enough to Know What Is Not Known." Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, vol. 18

(1979), pp. 357-64. Palincsar, Annemarie. "The Quest for Meaning from Ex

pository Text: A Teacher-Guided Journey." In Compre hension Instruction: Perspectives and Suggestions, edited by Gerald Duffy, Laura Roehler, and Jana Ma son, pp. 251-64. New York, N.Y.: Longman, 1984.

Reader's Digest Reading Skill Builders. Silver Edition. Pleasantville, N.Y: Reader's Digest Association, 1977.

Singer, Harry. "Active Comprehension: From Answering to

Asking Questions." The Reading Teacher, vol. 31 (May 1978), pp. 901-08.

Singer, Harry, and Dan Donlan. Reading and Learning from Text. Boston, Mass.: Little Brown, 1980.

Singer, Harry, and Dan Donlan. "Active Comprehension: Problem-Solving Schema with Question Generation for Comprehension of Complex Short Stories." Read ing Research Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 2 (1982), pp. 166 85.

Weiner, Cheryl. "The Effect of Training in Questioning and Student Question Generation on Reading Achieve ment." Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association conference, Toronto, Ont., March 1978.

IRA-Elva Knight Research Grants

Guidelines for applying for research grants from the IRA-Elva Knight Research

Fund are now available. This grants program was established to support prom

ising research in reading for which funding is not generally available from more

traditional sources. A maximum of US$5,000 has been set for each grant.

Proposals must be received by December 31,1985. Grants will be awarded at

the IRA Annual Convention in 1986. For complete guidelines and criteria, write to Research Grants, Research Department, International Reading Asso

ciation, 800 Barksdale Road, P.O. Box 8139, Newark, Delaware 19714-8139, USA.

Alternate description of reading processes Instead of referring to reading processes as being "top-down" versus "bottom

up," let's join the Australians and talk about "outside-in" and "inside-out" theo ries.

The terms "outside-in" and "inside-out" refer to the flow of information during

reading. The "outside-in" approach sees the reader, especially the young reader, as focusing on an outside object (print) and taking it in. The "inside-out" theory sees readers as focusing all their background knowledge on a text in order to

make sense of it. "Inside-out" means that reading has to be seen as an interac

tion between reader and text, not a one-way reception. For discussion, see B. Cambourne, "How Important Is Theory to the Read

ing Teacher?" in Australian Journal of Reading, vol. 2, no. 2 (1979), pp. 78-90, or Richard Parker, "The Reading Process?The Practicality of Good Theory," in

New Horizons (Hong Kong Teachers' Association), no. 25 (November 1984), pp. 148-59.




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