Developmental Psychology short true story

1. The main aim of reading is to successfully understand text and in order to do this we are reliant on several different skills. It is therefore no surprise that several theories have been suggested in an attempt to explain comprehension failure in reading. The purpose of Cain's (1999) study was to examine the relationship between children's levels of reading comprehension, their knowledge about the goals and processes of reading and the skills they use to apply that knowledge. Cain also wanted to examine exactly how one of these higher-level sources of comprehension failure or meta-cognitive aspects of reading is related to comprehension ability.

Shankweiler (1989) focused more on reading comprehension failure due to phonological processing difficulties rather than knowledge and comprehension relationships and comparisons in his study.Previous research on this subject has also looked at the meta-cognitive knowledge of children with poor reading skills but has not investigated how this knowledge might be related directly to comprehension ability. Some of the sources, which have been studied, are as follows - Phonological processing difficulties (Garner 1970), word level deficits (Perfetti 1985), and sentence-level deficits (Cromer 1970). Higher-level deficits include poor inference-making ability (Oakhill 1982,84). Cain's study however aimed to investigate those children whose comprehension difficulties appeared to come from the discourse level of processing.

The children have no problems with reading and they show no phonological or syntactic difficulties however they found it difficult to remember text even after having just read it. Unlike previous research, the study wanted to focus on certain factors like whether good and poor readers have different knowledge about any presented readings and whether procedural and declarative knowledge is directly related to comprehension ability. If this were found to be the case it would suggest that there are benefits to be found in teaching and practising the necessary meta-cognitive skills.Previous research such as that of Pazzaglia, Cornoldi and DeBeni (1995) has attempted to highlight the differences in knowledge between good and poor comprehenders but has never examined this issue when it comes to reading. Two aspects of metacognitive knowledge were examined in this study; it looked at the knowledge about the goals and processes of reading and the skill involved in applying that knowledge.

It is also important to point out that this study investigated possible solutions to the problems some people face when reading by determining types of strategies in reading that assist us in our memory of a story.The first study aimed to examine reading comprehension and whether declarative knowledge is related to it in any way; this is therefore exploring children's knowledge about the aims of reading and the different types of strategies employed in reading. The second study aimed to examine the relationship between procedural knowledge and reading comprehension. Forrest-Pressley and Waller (1994) investigated whether older and better readers were more able to adapt their reading style for different goals; this study employed the same design. To generalise the aims of this study it is fair to say that the goal was to investigate how knowledge about reading and the regulations of the reading process are related to comprehension skill. This is achieved by controlling the word reading school and by using a design that could determine whether any task performance differences were a by-product of differences in comprehension level.

The differences between the knowledge of strategies vary between high and low/average capability readers and this has lead to contradictory findings. Forrest-Pressley and Waller (1984) found that average and good readers differed in their knowledge about sentence level repair strategies but not word level strategies and Kirby and Moore (1987) found the opposite. It is important to point out that only the recent studies and neither of these examples has addressed discourse-level failures of comprehension, that is, important actions or events; this means the studies are insufficient in detecting a relation between knowledge and comprehension.Earlier studies such as Perfetti (1985) have also used non-standardised methods to assess comprehension skill; this means that other factors may have affected the results in some way.

Earlier studies also differ in that meta-cognitive knowledge and skills have been successfully taught to many 'normal' children, and also those who have learning difficulties, but the knowledge growth was not huge, and the experimental groups did not demonstrate superior intelligence and performance in standardised assessments of comprehension, as the current studies aim to (Paris, Jacobs, Sanrio and Cross, 1984, 1986).2. Both study one and two used three groups of participants. The first study used children between the ages of 7 and 8; some of them were skilled comprehenders and some were less skilled (the CAM group). Two tests were used on this selection process, the Gates MacGinitie Primary Two Vocals test, and the Neale analysis of reading ability, which is a group administered test where children are asked to select one out of four words to accompany a picture. This process screened out exceptional readers and left average readers so that the subjects could be assessed independently on form 1 of the Neale analysis, which is where children read a series of stories out loud, and word reading errors are corrected.

The test gave separate scores for reading accuracy based on the number of word pronunciation errors made by the child. Performance on this test was used to select and match the three groups. When the skilled and less skilled groups were compared it could be seen that a relationship existed. In the second sample the children were selected using the same methods as described above. The skilled and less skilled groups were matched for reading accuracy, chronological age, Gates Macginite sight vocabulary scores and the number of Neale stories, which had been completed. The comprehension ages of the groups here were seen to be significantly different, (t(24)=10.

45, p=(.001). The comprehension match group was matched to the less skilled comprehenders for comprehension level.After the groups had undergone a number of tests eventually the results were available to compare skilled comprehenders and less skilled comprehenders. In study two, good and poor comprehenders were matched on a measure of reading accuracy in order to determine whether reading comprehension was directly related to flexibility in reading style; a comprehension age match group was included here to test if flexibility in reading style was a by-product of comprehension level.

Sixteen skilled and sixteen less skilled comprehenders were matched and selected in the same way as before; however chronological age, Neale reading accuracy and the Gates MacGinitie sight vocals did not affect the selection process. Sixteen age match comprehension children were selected from an initial pool of 170 children so that the mean comprehension score was not significantly different to that of the less skilled groups. The use of the three groups of participants in these studies was to again, allow comparisons to be made in order that more informed deductions could be gathered from the results and hopefully be used for educational purposes.3.

In the first study the first sample was selected using the Gates MacGinitie test and provided particularly interesting results. Both the skilled and less skilled comprehenders showed that they had the right scores for their age in reading and these scores were not seen to have any significant measure difference. However the score for the skilled groups comprehension was above what had been predicted by their reading accuracy ability, whereas the less skilled groups comprehension scores were below their chronological age and at least six months below their reading accuracy ages. The difference for the two groups were seen to be significant, (t(51)=14.15,p<.

001).In sample two of the first study it was seen that the comprehension abilities of the younger comprehension age match groups in both samples might have been during Neale testing as the older children had higher accuracy scores and thus were asked less comprehension questions. Scores therefore that are achieved by older children on the stories, which may be considered too difficult for the younger children to understand, were ignored, and the data was re-analysed. The results found that the average numbers of questions answered were, for skilled 12.33, less skilled 8.

93 and for CAM group 9.30; the less skilled and the CAM group differ significantly on this test from the skilled comprehenders.Therefore the less skilled group and the CAM group can be matched in comprehension level abilities. The skilled comprehenders scores were re-analysed in a similar way to above and they were significantly higher than that of the CAM group; this indicates that superior comprehension skill is not only a result of superior word reading ability. The question answering data for sample two shows that less skilled comprehenders and the CAM groups do not differ in the number of questions answered correctly, whereas skilled comprehenders obtained significantly higher scores than the CAM group, (t(22)=3.14,p<.

01).In the test where children chose between two fictional readers, 34% of less skilled comprehenders selected the reader who could understand the words, but 52% of the CAM group and 71% of the skilled group chose this option; therefore the significance in scores between the skilled groups and others is great. In another independent measures experiment children had to develop strategies for story recall. There was significance shown here between skill groups and strategy due to the skilled comprehenders tendency to suggest a gist strategy, (X (1.38)=5.

43,p<.05). Children could score up to four points here. The means from this experiment were for the skilled group 2.42, less skilled 1.

71 and CAM 1.75. Post-hoc comparisons also revealed that skilled comprehenders received significantly higher scores than the less skilled comprehenders.An initial analysis of variance was conducted on the second study but it showed no effects of order and this factor was not involved interactions, indicating that none of the groups became orientated towards the comprehension question during the experiment. The groups differed in the number of questions that they answered correctly and there was a main effect skill group. These effects were qualified by a significant interaction between all factors.

The skilled and CAM groups achieved higher scores in the study condition than the skim condition, (t(15) =5.04,p<.05;tl(15)=2.78,p=<0.5), but there was no difference between the less skilled comprehenders scores for the studies.

The higher the score when assessing reading speed, the slower the reading time. It was shown that the CAM group read more slowly than the other two groups, however the effect was marginal and thus not pursued further.The interaction between skill group and instruction type did not reach conventional levels of significance. Both the skilled and CAM groups read faster in the skim reading condition than in the study condition. The difference between these two conditions for the less skilled group did not reach conventional levels of significance. Study two had various sub-tasks; title conditions, fun condition, skim condition and study condition.

In the title condition more than 80% of children produced titles that listed the main story characters, so this data was not analysed further. In the fun condition, a one-way analysis of the three groups did not differ, less skilled got 4.13, skilled 3.56 and CAM 3.

44. In the skim condition the less skilled group were poorer, but not significantly so. In the study condition the three groups provided comparable estimates of how well they would do on the comprehension questions, but only the less skilled groups overestimated their ability.4. It is therefore obvious that skilled comprehenders and less skilled comprhenders differ vastly in their knowledge about reading, which of course suggests that there is a clear relationship between comprehension skill and knowledge in the ability to adapt reading style. Several features are however shared by the skilled comprhenders and the age match group; this suggests that different conditions are not always responsible for different results between groups.

The data mentioned above verifies that meta-cognitive differences are related specifically to comprehension ability.However we do not know exactly how this relationship works; it may be that good meta-cognitive knowledge is a result of reading comprehension success, or it may be that it is a consequence of experience in reading and comprehending text. Although knowledge about optimal reading goals is important, it does not assure good text comprehension. The results of the second study show that the difference between the skilled and less skilled comprehender groups indicates that the ability to adapt reading style in different circumstances is directly related to reading comprehension ability. The study had also shown that children could adapt their reading behaviour more appropriately than adults, which demonstrates that more flexibility should be used when assessing candidate skills for comprehension success.

Meta-cognitive deficits in reading regulation contributes to comprehension failure; it is therefore fair to say that training would improve this ability, and this has been shown by children's improvement when under instruction. If training schemes fail, it is almost certainly a result of the use of a poor strategy, which is obviously vital for comprehension to ensure automatic reading; strategy is also important when adapting reading styles. The ability to adapt reading styles in different circumstances is directly related to reading comprehension ability and this is seen by the significant differences between skilled and less skilled comprehender groups. It is however important not to forget the above mentioned factors, such as reading speed and strategy when studying reading comprehension ability; without these, reading comprehension ability may be greatly reduced and the findings of the above studies would be considered erroneous and ambiguous.