Helping Students to Understand What Comprehension Questions Are Asking

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 8:00 am Four Seasons Ballroom 4
  In Roundtable Session: Rethinking Innovative Strategies to Support Exceptional Learners (Table 6)

Abstract

Performance on many tests of comprehension show that students struggle specifically with tasks that require reasoning and inference making beyond just finding information in a text. This project was designed to test if helping students understand the nature of comprehension questions could improve their comprehension outcomes. Results suggest a link between recognizing different question types and test performance. A training program developed to teach this differentiation by having students categorize test questions before answering them improved comprehension outcomes. The benefits of this categorization training extended beyond the practiced texts, enhancing comprehension also for other, novel texts. These findings highlight the importance of teaching students to appreciate the need to engage in reasoning to promote reading comprehension.

Authors

• Lena Hildenbrand, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Jean-Francois Rouet, CNRS and University of Poitiers

• Jennifer Wiley, University of Illinois at Chicago