Affective Appraisal and Metacognitive Questioning as a Pedagogical Model for Teaching Literary Reasoning

• In Event: Reading for Understanding: Initial Studies of Students and Teachers Using Multiple Sources in Content Areas

Abstract

Purpose of the Study: Novice readers can summarize events in a short story or identify the topic of a poem, but they struggle to construct the figurative meanings that serve as hallmarks of literary reasoning (Rabinowitz, 1987). This quasi-experimental study examines the hypothesis that a pedagogical strategy of affective appraisal (evaluating the overall positive or negative impact of a text), in conjunction with metacognitive questioning, will scaffold high school readers in complex literary interpretation. While cognitive and psychological research has explored the role of affect in readers’ responses to literary texts (Miall, 1989; Zwaan, 1999), the pedagogical implications are largely unexplored.

Theoretical Framework: Affect is central to sensemaking in everyday experience (Bargh et al., 1996; Zajonc, 1984; Osgood, 1964), and literary texts have been shown to activate affective responses (see Mar & Oatley, 2008; Palencik, 2008; and Zwaan, 1999). The pedagogical challenge is to make such affect-driven sensemaking explicit as a tool for novice readers of literary texts. This study draws on literary theory about heuristics for literary interpretation (Rabinowitz, 1987) and empirical work in Cultural Modeling (Lee, 2007) on making everyday sensemaking strategies visible as pedagogical resources.

Research Design: The site is an urban, low-income and ethnically diverse high school. The sample included two experimental (N =37) and two control senior English classes (N = 41). The intervention group participated in a four-week instructional intervention taught by the researcher and classroom teacher. Data included an observational protocol, video of classes, a pre-post assessment of students’ ability to interpret figurative tropes of previously unread poems, and clinical interviews of a representative sample of experimental and control students reading new poems.

The intervention involved a series of scaffolded exercises using texts ranging from advertisements to song and poetry. Students practiced affective appraisal and metacognitive questioning about the outcome valence of the text, first asking whether a text’s ending seemed positive, negative, or both, and then asking why and how the text might have led them to make those appraisals. This heuristic led students to construct general thematic inferences. Students also used this heuristic to examine specific details or textual patterns in context, which helped them identify the effects of rhetorical moves made by the author.

Pre-post assessments were analyzed using chi square tests comparing experimental and control responses. Clinical interviews were analyzed to document features of the poems to which students attended and the metacognitive processes students employed. Video analysis examined the participation structures that enabled literary reasoning, focusing on students’ uptake of affective appraisals.

Results/Conclusions: Results from both assessments and think alouds document that students in the intervention constructed more thematic inferences extrapolated from figurative sources in the poems. Additionally, students in the intervention were more likely to speak for longer periods of time and offer thematic interpretations during class discussion.

Significance: This research contributes to pedagogical heuristics to support literary response among less experienced readers by scaffolding everyday sensemaking processes. It also provides pedagogical connections to the psychological research on affect.

Author

• Sarah Levine, Northwestern University