Cognitive Science Investigations of Reading Difficulties for Low-Literacy Adults

• In Event: Current Trends in Adult Education Research and Their Implications for Policy, Practice, and Science

Abstract

Purpose: I will discuss how advances in cognitive science bear on adult education issues, taking what is known from well-documented cognitive theories to inform studies with struggling adult readers. I will also demonstrate how these theories help to explore hypotheses about reading comprehension to identify-- for individual readers-- the component skills that present difficulties. Additionally, I will discuss how research with struggling adult learners refines cognitive theories.

Perspective(s): This research begins with cognitive science theories about online, moment-to-moment reading processes, which are fast, automatic, and unconscious. These theories (e.g., Kintsch's context-integration theory) specify the various components of reading that may present difficulties to readers: constructing a text structure complete with the appropriate relations among the pieces of information in it (e.g., causality); understanding anaphors (e.g., pronouns) and word meanings; bringing in appropriate genera l knowledge (e.g., "milking animals" should evoke cows); and generating appropriate inferences (e.g., "John fell from a 20th floor" should lead to the inference that John died). Knowing which of these components creates difficulties is essential to creating appropriate interventions.

Methods: We examine the foundational moment-to-moment processes that provide the infrastructure for understanding and reasoning. We use methods common in psychology (e.g., lexical decision) to determine whether readers generate a word or concept from what they've read. For example, if readers respond quickly to cow after reading "milking animals", they have an appropriate inference during reading. We use similar techniques "off-line" to examine which pieces of text information are remembered later. With both on-line and off-line methods, we investigate the interplay between what readers understand as they read and what they know after they read. Our methods contrast with those that have been used by most researchers to examine slower, more conscious processes, e.g., those involved in answering questions about a previously-read text.

Data: Our participants are students in Adult Basic Literacy Education (ABLE) classes reading at the fourth to ninth grade levels. We compare their reading profiles to college undergraduates to explore whether ABLE students' processes are diminished or missing. For each participant, we also collect data about reading processes and measures of IQ, social-economic status, age, education level, vocabulary, and word-decoding skill.

Results: Some ABLE students are low on both reasoning and verbal IQ, others only on verbal IQ, suggesting different sources of reading difficulties. All ABLE students perform worse than undergraduates in word identification, even for words that occur in English very frequently.

Significance: The findings that some ABLE students are low in both types of IQ and others only one, and that they all struggle with identifying even frequent words have implications for targeted reading interventions and for models of adult cognition more broadly. Our work, based on current theoretical frameworks generated for the general population, can lead to comprehension tests and interventions for low-literacy adults that are more nuanced than those used now, while concurrently expanding cognitive learning theories.

Author

• Gail McKoon, The Ohio State University