" Instruction for struggling readers should include knowledge building...."
Handbook of Reading Research. Volume 4, p.349
"The construction of mental representations does not involve the application
of precise, sophisticated, context-sensitive rules...." Walter Kintsch.
Comprehension, p.5
When it comes to the role background knowledge plays in reading, the verdict has been in for years now: The more background knowledge readers have about the topic discussed in print, the faster they comprehend and remember what they read. In a way, though, many instructors, including me, have found that insight to be a mixed blessing. The good news was that readers with poor comprehension were probably coping with a lack of background knowledge rather than with an innate inability to process prose efficiently.
The bad news was that the students we were seeing in reading labs and classes pretty much lacked any shred of academic background knowledge. There were lots of things they knew about life and the world, but very little of that knowledge was likely to speed up their understanding of a text describing photosynthesis or the Missouri Compromise.
Almost all the instructors I know, including me, were flummoxed by the magnitude of background knowledge we felt we needed to give students if we were to show them that textbook comprehension was not always going to be arduous and exhausting. Sure we could hand out textbook selections that dispensed a nugget or two of academic wisdom but those few nuggets didn't even half fill a pretty empty bucket. We did our best but still felt our efforts were inadequate, maybe even pointless, largely because students came to us knowing a lot about family dynamics, romantic relationships, pop culture, cell phone plans. etc, but painfully little about the world outside their personal lives.
Yet in retrospect, I have come to think that those of us who didn't think we could ever provide students with enough background knowledge to be useful thought about it in the wrong way. We thought, or at least I did, that unless we gave students the entire lowdown on say the causes and consequences of the Civil War, we were wasting their time. Yet the more I read about the role of background knowledge in comprehension the more I think we were over-estimating our task. (It's also true that the more I read the work of cognitive psychologist Walter Kintsch, the more I am convinced that detailed background knowledge is not the sina qua non of comprehension; it's having the larger framework that really counts)
When researchers talk about background knowledge (See, for instance, "Integrating Memory-based and Constructivist Processes in Accounts of Reading Comprehension,
available here, they are talking about a general framework that allows readers to call up appropriate word meaning or supply the appropriate inferences expected by the author. And general frameworks,with emphasis on the word general, are not that difficult to supply, particularly with the aid of the Web.
Through brief, sequenced assignments, we--and instructors in other departments interested in making sure their assignments are understood-- can supply students with what I call knowledge "snippets" about key academic topics. These snippets can be pieces of text, videos, photos, poems, memoirs, etc. But what they must do is (1) provide a big picture or overview of what a person, theory or event accomplished (2) generally explain why a person, idea or event is considered significant (3) define a key concept essential to understanding the topic addressed and (4) include a relevant visual aid. Students can then use those snippets to create broad knowledge frameworks that allow them to plug in, or as the researchers say, "instantiate" related facts and ideas when they encounter them in their reading.
As the reading researcher Nancy Marshall pointed out years ago, schemas or, the term I prefer, knowledge frameworks "allow an exchange of meaning to occur." They allow the reader to "include new information, to rearrange old information, or to identify old information with new sources." (Available only in print in Comprehension and the Competent Reader, p. 41.)Without these knowledge frameworks,students are in mental free fall, trying desperately to create the larger network or pattern they need in order to categorize new information coming in from their textbooks.
But keeping students from stumbling around in a text without finding any purchase is not so hard as we once may have thought, particularly with the advent of the Web. When students have assignments that confuse them, they can use heading key words, for instance, to get a general sense of what their text is about, and that general sense is probably all they need to develop a schema that will, in turn, improve their comprehension.
Showing posts with label comprehension. Show all posts
Showing posts with label comprehension. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Thoughts on Readability Formulas
Although I want to return to the subject of voice in writing, a topic that really intrigues me, this post is on readability formulas, a subject I'm frequently asked about in relation to my textbooks.
There is, however, a specific stimulus for this post. In an effort to go paperless in my office, I’m re-reading old journal articles and deciding which ones I want to scan into my online notebook. To that end, I re-read a 1982 article in the Reading Research Quarterly (V.18 #1 p.23) in which the authors described their research on informal reading inventories and commented that using passages with different levels didn't seem to affect students' performance. In other words, as the grade level of the text went up or down based on the readability formulas used, students’ comprehension scores didn't go up or down with them.
The authors then went on to write: “Although readability formulae reflect word difficulty and sentence complexity, they fail to account for one's familiarity with a text Presumably, this failure to control for students' familiarity with reading material diminishes the validity of both commercial and curriculum-based inventories developed with readability formulae."
Despite the resurgence of readability formulas since that article was written (in the 1980s, they were roundly and repeatedly criticized and both the IRA and NCTE discouraged their use in the creation of written materials) I think the authors' suggestion that readability formulas are not fully adequate to the task of revealing how well students might or might not understand what they read is still timely. Actually, as many discussions of readability formulas and their history point out—See, for just one instance, the Plain Language Association website—the formulas were meant to measure ease of reading, not comprehension.
If you find that distinction confusing, you're not the only one. But after pondering it a bit, I think it means a passage coming in at a low grade level, based on a readability formula, could be easily read if you define "reading" as knowing and pronouncing the words. However, that ranking can't tell you whether or not readers can readily grasp the concepts or relationships expressed in the passage. That is, a passage given a low grade level by a readability formula is not necessarily easy to understand. By the same token, passages that earn high grade levels aren’t necessarily hard to read.
Readability formulas don't measure comprehension because they do not take into account key comprehension factors such as the syntactic complexity of the language, familiarity of the vocabulary, reader’s background knowledge, and the text’s conceptual difficulty. Instead they rely mainly on length of sentences and numbers of syllables with some formulas including elements like passive constructions and prepositions.
For instance, a readability formula would treat ennui and boredom as equals because both words have two syllables. Yet the truth is most students would immediately know the meaning of boredom and be dumbfounded by the word ennui. Similarly, inconceivable is shorter than unimaginable, but that certainly doesn't make it easier for student readers to interpret.
Readability formulas also rely heavily on length of sentences to identify ease of reading. Sentence length, though, doesn't tell the whole story. As the web usability guru Jakob Nielsen points out in his discussion of writing for the web, these two sentences are the exact same length but conceptually, they are far from equal:
He waved his hands.
He waived his rights.
As Nielsen correctly says, "everybody understands what the first sentence describes,[however] you might need a law degree to fully comprehend the implications of the second sentence."
Given what I see as the limitations of readability formulas, it's always disconcerting to be asked what readability formula I use to write my textbooks because, in all honesty, I have to say “none.” I use the Flesch Kincaid readability feature of Word strictly as a predictor of potential difficulty. If a passage comes out higher than I think it should be for the book’s audience, I check it for syntactical and linguistic features, known to cause problems, i.e. distance of pronouns from references, embedded clauses, passive constructions, etc. (The Purdue Online Writing Lab has a list of five principles for readability that I find invaluable, available as a PDF or PPT series). And if I really want to cover a topic that consistently comes out with a high, grade level, for instance, passages on the brain with all those pesky references to the multisyllabic word hemispheres, I will classroom test to see how students do with the passages in question.
While I could wax even longer on how readability formulas should be used with extreme caution, I’ll end with a quotation from a study put out by the University of Illinois at Urbana, available on the web at the Eric Clearing House and titled “Conceptual and Empirical Bases of Readability Formulas”:
They study was published in 1986, but to my mind, the sentiments are not the slightest bit dated.
There is, however, a specific stimulus for this post. In an effort to go paperless in my office, I’m re-reading old journal articles and deciding which ones I want to scan into my online notebook. To that end, I re-read a 1982 article in the Reading Research Quarterly (V.18 #1 p.23) in which the authors described their research on informal reading inventories and commented that using passages with different levels didn't seem to affect students' performance. In other words, as the grade level of the text went up or down based on the readability formulas used, students’ comprehension scores didn't go up or down with them.
The authors then went on to write: “Although readability formulae reflect word difficulty and sentence complexity, they fail to account for one's familiarity with a text Presumably, this failure to control for students' familiarity with reading material diminishes the validity of both commercial and curriculum-based inventories developed with readability formulae."
Despite the resurgence of readability formulas since that article was written (in the 1980s, they were roundly and repeatedly criticized and both the IRA and NCTE discouraged their use in the creation of written materials) I think the authors' suggestion that readability formulas are not fully adequate to the task of revealing how well students might or might not understand what they read is still timely. Actually, as many discussions of readability formulas and their history point out—See, for just one instance, the Plain Language Association website—the formulas were meant to measure ease of reading, not comprehension.
If you find that distinction confusing, you're not the only one. But after pondering it a bit, I think it means a passage coming in at a low grade level, based on a readability formula, could be easily read if you define "reading" as knowing and pronouncing the words. However, that ranking can't tell you whether or not readers can readily grasp the concepts or relationships expressed in the passage. That is, a passage given a low grade level by a readability formula is not necessarily easy to understand. By the same token, passages that earn high grade levels aren’t necessarily hard to read.
Readability formulas don't measure comprehension because they do not take into account key comprehension factors such as the syntactic complexity of the language, familiarity of the vocabulary, reader’s background knowledge, and the text’s conceptual difficulty. Instead they rely mainly on length of sentences and numbers of syllables with some formulas including elements like passive constructions and prepositions.
For instance, a readability formula would treat ennui and boredom as equals because both words have two syllables. Yet the truth is most students would immediately know the meaning of boredom and be dumbfounded by the word ennui. Similarly, inconceivable is shorter than unimaginable, but that certainly doesn't make it easier for student readers to interpret.
Readability formulas also rely heavily on length of sentences to identify ease of reading. Sentence length, though, doesn't tell the whole story. As the web usability guru Jakob Nielsen points out in his discussion of writing for the web, these two sentences are the exact same length but conceptually, they are far from equal:
He waved his hands.
He waived his rights.
As Nielsen correctly says, "everybody understands what the first sentence describes,[however] you might need a law degree to fully comprehend the implications of the second sentence."
Given what I see as the limitations of readability formulas, it's always disconcerting to be asked what readability formula I use to write my textbooks because, in all honesty, I have to say “none.” I use the Flesch Kincaid readability feature of Word strictly as a predictor of potential difficulty. If a passage comes out higher than I think it should be for the book’s audience, I check it for syntactical and linguistic features, known to cause problems, i.e. distance of pronouns from references, embedded clauses, passive constructions, etc. (The Purdue Online Writing Lab has a list of five principles for readability that I find invaluable, available as a PDF or PPT series). And if I really want to cover a topic that consistently comes out with a high, grade level, for instance, passages on the brain with all those pesky references to the multisyllabic word hemispheres, I will classroom test to see how students do with the passages in question.
While I could wax even longer on how readability formulas should be used with extreme caution, I’ll end with a quotation from a study put out by the University of Illinois at Urbana, available on the web at the Eric Clearing House and titled “Conceptual and Empirical Bases of Readability Formulas”:
Problems arise when difficult words and long sentences are treated as the direct cause of difficulty in comprehension and are used in readability formulas to predict the readers' comprehension. Readability formulas are not the most appropriate measure and cannot reliably predict how well individual readers will comprehend particular texts. Far more important are text and reader properties which formulas cannot measure. Neither can any formula be a reliable guide for editing a text to reduce its difficulty.
They study was published in 1986, but to my mind, the sentiments are not the slightest bit dated.
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