Flexibility in Strategy Use During Reading Comprehension: One Instantiation of Cognitive Flexibility

• In Event: 34.074 - The Underpinnings of Cognitive Flexibility and Instructional Implications: An Interactive Symposium

Abstract

Many learning situations require flexibility from learners, and one such situation is flexibility while learning from expository text. Students at the high school level and up read across many types of expository text, including science, history, mathematics, health, and other topics such as music/arts. Reading is also done for different purposes, such as before a lecture, to study for a test, to prepare a presentation, to collaborate on a group project, and so on. While reading, learners can come across words whose meaning is unknown, can reach an impasse in understanding, can pause while retrieving information from long-term memory, and other such temporary impasses that require flexibility in problem solving. For example, the reader who reaches an unknown word might ask a classmate, but could also remember that the Internet is also available in that particular study situation.

Levels of flexibility may differentiate learners within the same learning situation, and one example comes from our recent work with undergraduates studying from their own geology textbook (Cromley & Wills, 2016). Learners who gained more from pre- to posttest were very flexible in their sequences of strategy use, except just before they drew an inference (where they always enacted a high-level strategy such as taking notes, summarizing, reading notes, activating prior knowledge, etc.). By contrast, learners who gained little were inflexible in sequences of low-level (e.g., underlining, pre-reading, paraphrasing) to high-level strategies; the one exception was that they were too flexible just before they drew an inference. Just before drawing inferences they engaged in a wide variety of low- and high-level strategies. One implication of these findings is that cognitive flexibility may be more adaptive in certain phases of studying than others, and that data should be collected during learning in order to identify where flexibility is most adaptive.

Author

• Jennifer G. Cromley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign