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To cite this article: Merlin C. Wittrock (1989) Generative Processes of Comprehension, Educational Psychologist, 24:4, 345-376,
DOI: 10.1207/s15326985ep2404_2
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EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGIST, 24(4), 345-376
Copyright 8 1990, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Merlin C . Wittrock
Graduate School of Education
University of California, Los Angeles
Within the last 20 years, many of the people who study reading have shifted
their perspective, and consequently their research interests, to focus on the
critical role that human cognitive processes, such as attention, motivation,
knowledge acquisition, encoding, learning strategies, and metacognition,
play in influencing comprehension (Wittrock, 1986b, 1989). The shift
meant that we became less interested in how environments directly and
automatically influence learning.
Instead, we became interested in how learners use background knowl-
edge, or schemata, and thought processes, such as verbal elaborations and
imagery, to construct meanings for the text. In short, reading became
reading with understanding.
At a deeper level, the conception of the learners' roles in reading and in
knowledge acquisition, as well as the teachers' roles in influencing both of
them, changed. The learners became the sources of plans, intentions, goals,
ideas, memories, strategies, and emotions actively used to attend to, select,
and construct meaning from stimuli and knowledge from experience. The
a central role in retrieval. Since the days of the ancient teachers of rhetoric,
such as Cicero and Quintillian, constructing relations between experience
and new information, by generating interactive images between the old
ideas and the new events, has been a favorite and effective pedagogical
technique (Wittrock et al., 1977).
These interests also fit well with earlier but often forgotten 20th-century
findings. Thorndike (1931) largely abandoned his law of exercise or
frequency. He found that one could spend time practicing behavior and not
profit or improve as a result of the practice alone. Other conditions, such as
rewards and belongingness, were necessary for practice to produce learning.
Within the last two decades, we have again come to the view that reading
comprehension depends on the learners' thoughts, feelings, schemata, and
information-processingsystems. With the return to this ancient perspective,
new conceptions of reading, and of its learning and its teaching, arise in the
research literature on comprehension. In this article, I present one of these
conceptions -the model of generative reading comprehension. It focuses on
the constructive or, generative processes of reading usually considered
characteristic of written composition.
Reading and writing differ from each other in the thought processes and
human behavior they represent. These well-known differences are summa-
rized best by the commonly accepted belief that writing is the process of
GENERATIVE PROCESSES OF COMPREHENSION 347
experience to the text. Writing also involves building relations among the
words in sentences, the sentences in paragraphs, and the paragraphs in
texts. In these important ways, generative reading comprehensi~nand
effective writing relate closely to each other (Wittroek, 1983b).
obvious and subtle ways from speaking, listening, and writing, it shares
important psychological and cognitive processes with them.
Briefly stated, the model includes four major components: generation,
motivation, attention, and memory. In the model, comprehension involves
the reader's active generation of two types of semantic and pragmatic
relations: (a) among the parts of the text and (b) between the text and
knowledge or experience. The active generation of these two types of
relations implies a motivation or willingness to invest effort in reading and
an ability to attribute success and failure in generating relations to one's
effort. Attention, the third element in the model, directs the generative
processes to relevant text, related stored knowledge, and memory of
pertinent experience. Memory, including preconceptions, metacognitions,
abstract knowledge, and concrete experience, comprises the fourth element
of the model.
The essence of the generative learning model (Wittrock, 1974a, 1974b,
1978a, 1978b, 1981b, 1983b) is that the mind, or the brain, is not a passive
consumer of information. Instead, it actively constructs its own interpre-
tations of information and draws inferences from them. People ignore some
information and selectively attend to other information. In other words,
although our brains often respond reflexively to incoming stimulation, our
minds are much more than "blank slates" that passively learn and record
incoming information (Wittrock, 1980). The stored memories and infor-
mation-processing strategies of our cognitive systems interact with the
sensory information received from the environment, selectively attend to
this information, relate it to memory, and actively construct meaning for it.
Generation is a fundamental cognitive process in comprehension. Gen-
GENERATIVE PROCESSES OF COMPREHENSION 349
Motivation
people nor even to the students' own abilities. When students attribute
learning to other people or to factors external to themselves, the effort they
invest in learning, that is, their motivation, tends to decline.
These ideas about motivation derive from recently developed models of
academic achievement, for example, as discussed by Bernard Weiner
(1979). These ideas are neither original nor unique to generative learning.
They imply that the learners' attributional processes must sometimes be
modified before reading comprehension can be facilitated. The meaning the
learners generate about the causes of learning influences their motivation
and their willingness to become active in generative learning.
These ideas contrast sharply with commonly practiced principles of
accountability only for teachers, of mentally passive learners acquiring
knowledge with little or no effort, of time to learn, or of practice and
reinforcement as adequate to produce learning. These principles are not
wrong. They are useful, provided that you understand how they operate.
For example, rewards do not invariably bring about learning or feelings of
success. Instead, rewards produce these effects when students value them
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and attribute them, at least in part, to their own actions. Success is not
enough. Its effects depend on students' interpretations of its causes and
meaning.
From this perspective, how can one change student attributions? Richard
deCharms (1976) taught teachers and students in St. Louis to perceive
themselves as causes of their own actions and to take responsibility for their
own success or failure as teachers in inner-city schools.
decharm's origin training program continued over 2 years. As a result,
both teachers and students changed. They each increased in the responsi-
bility they took for their own actions. The children's achievement in
mathematics (arithmetic) and language also increased. The gains in reading,
unfortunately, were less than those in arithmetic and language, suggesting
that to increase reading comprehension improve more than motivation.
From a different perspective, Barbara McCombs (1983) taught military
personnel to modify their learning strategies and motivation to match the
requirements of the learning tasks. The motivational skills training program
improved performance in technical training.
Attention
Another old but recently revived concept, attention, offers some insights
into the problems of teaching reading and of understanding some learning
disabilities (Wittrock, 1986a). Recent research has analyzed mental retar-
dation and learning disabilities into cognitive processes, such as attention,
that lead to a deeper understanding of the practical problems and their
possible remedies.
Attention develops slowly in many children. Most normally developing
children from about age 5 years to age 15 years show a gradual increase in
ability to learn and to remember centrally important information, but they
show no increise in ability to remember incidental or irrelevant informa-
tion. Attention consists of several components, among them are a short-
term, orienting response, and a long-term or sustained voluntary response.
These two types of attention, along with other types, have been studied
extensively in neuropsychology (see Wittrock, 1980) and in special educa-
tion.
Krupski (1975) studied short-term involuntary reactions and long-term
voluntary reactions of mentally retarded children. She found that mentally
retarded children react normally to short-term attention tasks but abnor-
mally slowly to sustained attention tasks in an academic setting. In
nonacademic settings, however, mentally retarded children improved their
performance. In other studies (see Hallahan & Reeve, 1980), mentally
retarded children have also shown deficiencies in short-term voluntary
attention. Apparently, their attentional problems primarily involve voli-
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remembering what they have read. In this same study, children learned to
construct stories from the sentences they read. The strategy of constructing
stories facilitated comprehension and increased memory of the sentences.
The goal apparently influenced selective attention. The construction of
stories probably enhanced comprehension by facilitating the construction
of relations across the sentences in the stories.
Malamuth (1979) used cognitive techniques, similar to methods devel-
oped by Meichenbaum and Goodman (1971), to improve self-management
among poor readers who were not hyperactive. Sustained attention in-
creased as a result of the training, and reading scores also improved,
indicating the utility of cognitive training programs for some normal
children with reading problems.
These cognitive training programs show that children, including hyper-
active students, can show improvements in reading. Most effective training
programs teach the children strategies of self-control that provide an
explicit set of steps for them to follow that usually involves analyzing visual
stimuIi carefully before responding to them. Most of the successful
programs also involve extensive training.
Generalization of these training programs is a problem, but the cognitive
training programs usually provide the greatest amount of generalization,
compared with the behavioral and drug programs (Keogh & Glover, 1980).
Memory
cognition. This topic is too extensive to expand on here (see Wittrock et al.,
1977). The essential point is that generation functions by creating relations
between this vast store of organized information in long-term memory and
the text to be comprehended. The construction of these relations leads to
comprehension.
Generation
its intended meaning. Being given the answer does not necessarily aid or
deter comprehension. It depends on what we do with that information,
what we think about it, and how we relate it to our knowledge. Also, being
given an explanation by a teacher does not preclude our need to invent that
same explanation for ourselves to comprehend the intended meaning.
Generation, not discovery, is the process of comprehension.
From the perspective of my model, the teaching of reading and the
teaching of writing share subtle and important generative processes.
Writing is more: than the construction of text for meiming, and reading is
more than the construction of meaning for text. Writing is also a process of
constructing m~eaning,which gets revised and made more precise as one
edits, revises, and generates (Wittrock, 1983b). Reading involves recon-
structing the te.xt in familiar terms, examples, and experiences that allow us
to relate our knowledge and memory to the message and to the perspective
of the author. l[m generative learning, students' knowledge, experience, and
learning strategies are crucially important because, as strange as it may
seem, answers given to learners must still be generated by them (i.e., related
to context and to knowledge and experience) before they can comprehend
them.
A teacher facilitates these generative processes of comprehension. The art
of generative teaching is knowing how and when to facilitate the learners'
construction of relations among the parts of the text and their knowledge.
In addition, teachers can teach the learners how to increase their ability to
control their generative processes so that reading comprehension becomes
increasingly independent for them. An important goal is for the learners to
learn to controll their own generative processes.
354 WITTROCK
TABLE 1
Ways to Stimulate Generation
Teacher Given Learner Constructed
Among Concepts Presented in Instruction
Titles Compose titles
Headings Compose headings
Questions Write questions
Objectives State objectives
Summaries Write summaries
Graphs Draw graphs
Tables Prepare tables
Main ideas Construct main ideas
Between Instruction and Prior Knowledge
Demonstrations Student demonstrations
Metaphors Compose metaphors
Analogues Propose analogues
Examples Give examples
Pictures Draw pictures
Applications Solve problems
Interpretations Develop explanations
Paraphrases Put into own words
Inferences Draw inferences
GENERATIVE PROCESSES OF COMPREHENSION 355
Laboratory studies, usually with college students learning word lists and
word pairs, haire investigated the generation effect and have tried to explain
it. Wittrock and Carter (1975) gave college students hierarchially arranged
words and asked the learners to process them generatively, that is, to relate
them to one mother and to construct the proper hierarchical relations
among them. Whether the words were conceptually related to one another
or were chosen at random from a dictionary, generative processing of them
sizably increase~d,usually doubled, their retention.
In two experiments, Wittrock and Goldberg (1975) studied children's and
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college students' learning and memory of words that they were asked to put
into sentences, a story, or an interactive image. The high-imagery words
were best remembered by the college students and the children. The
directions to group the words into stories, sentences, or images facilitated
recall for the children but not for the college students. The results imply that
the effectiveness of the directions depends on the learners' developmental
level and on the cognitive processes they have learned to use. Instructional
aids, such as ~directions,can help learners only if they are not already
spontaneously performing the generative activities mentioned in the instruc-
tions.
In three expe~imentswith fourth and fifth graders, the type of instruction
necessary to teach the children how to generate a concept depended heavily
on the previously learned relevant concepts (Wittrock, 1978b). When the
training focused on a relevant but not highly salient concept, transfer
increased quickliy and markedly.
In five experiments with college students, Slameeka and Graf (1978)
compared memory for words that were either read or generated. For all
measures in all five studies, the generation of words enhanced memory. The
generation phenomenon held across different rules and materials, across
timed or self-]placed learning, and across different types of tests and
different experimental designs.
In the third experiment, they tested selective attention as the sole
explanation for the generation effect. The responses, which were generated
by the learners, but not the stimuli, which were nlot generated by the
learners, were better recognized later. If selective attention were the sole
explanation of the generation effect, then the stimuli would have been as
well recognized i3s the responses, because the learners selectively attended to
both of them. However, the data from the fifth experiment are less clear cut
on this issue, making it difficult to establish any firm conclusions about the
role of attention in generation. The authors, however, concluded that their
data eliminate overt responding, frequency, exercise, time to learn, and
levels of processing as explanations of the generation effect. Therefore,
both distinctive encoding and effort are still possible explanations.
Jacoby (1978) compared reading with generating solutions to simple word
problems. Compared with reading the words, generating the response
words increased their recall when the problems were seen only once earlier
or were seen repeatedly in a spaced pattern. In massed practice, reading or
generation made no difference in recall, apparently because massed practice
trivializes generative reading. The learner can recall the answer directly
from short-term memory. When the interval between presentations of a
problem is longer than short-term memory, the learner must construct
rather than recall the solution. Jacoby concluded that overt responding is
not enough to facilitate learning. Reading the answer immediately prior to
the problem reduced performance. He concluded that effort was critical to
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not always involve these same constructive processes. When we can make
reading become more like written composition, and engage generative
activities, it seems that we can increase reading comprehension.
Two-word heading
One-word heading
Control
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the experimental group. The control group read the same stories, but they
were not asked to generate summaries. The active generation of relations
among the sentences in a paragraph sizably facilitated comprehension and
retention.
In another study (Wittrock, Marks, & Doctorow, 1975), we gave 468
fifth- and sixth-grade public school students familiar stories in which we
embedded unfamiliar and undefined vocabulary words. Compared with the
control groups given the same vocabulary words embedded in unfamiliar
stories, all the generative groups increased, from 50% to 100%, the number
of new vocabulary words they could correctly define on a vocabulary test.
The study implies that students use familiar story contexts to generate
meanings for vocabulary words.
In a related study (Marks, Doctorow, & Wittrock, 1974) with 230
sixth-grade students, we substituted one familiar vocabulary word per
sentence (e.g., boy for lad) for one unfamiliar word per sentence in stories
from commercially published reading stories. Comprehension of the stories
increased at least 50%, and sometimes 100010, with time to learn held
constant across the treatment groups. The generation of sentence and story
meaning seems to depend heavily on understanding all of the parts of the
sentences, as the model of generative learning implies.
With 87 fifth-grade students, we examined whether generating pictures
for vocabulary words would enhance memory of definitions, compared
GENERATIVE PROCESSES OF COLMPREHENSION 361
TABLE 3
Treatment lkleans (and Standard Deviations) for Recall, Time to Learn,
Analytic Ability, and Spatial Ability
Treatment Read Texta Summarizationb Analogy"
Recall 22.4 29.8 27.2
(9.21) (7.72) (6.25)
T i e (minutes) 76.1 86.3 85.2
(23.51) (18.6) (15.3)
Holistic ability 8.2 8.4 7.5
(2.0) (2.2) (2.6)
Analytic ability 16.9 16.6 18.0
(2.8) (4.0) (3.2)
'n = 21. bn = 19.
Note. From "Generation of Summaries and Analogies and Analytic and Holistic Abilities"
by M. C. Wittrock and K. A. Alesandrini, in press, American Educational Research Journal.
Copyright by Amt:rican Educational Research Association. Adapted by permission.
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TABLE 4
Treatment Means for the Comprehension and Retention Tests
Generate Generate
Generate Generate Generate Experimental Experimental
Heading Generate Generate TS TS Experimental Sentence Sentence
Given, Ts, TS & Using Relating Sentence, Using Using
Control Heading Generate Generate Heading Paragraph Given Test to Head Paragraph Given
(Read) Generate Given Summary TS Given Head Head Experience Given Head Heading
Treatment n = 129 n = 63 n = 59 n = 60 n = 66 n = 69 n = 67 n = 60 n = 63 n = 62 n = 63 n = 64
Comprehension
Story A 10.4 14.1 13.8 12.9 13.0 12.1 12.6 12.7 13.4 12.0 12.3 12.4
Story B 9.0 12.2 11.6 12.4 12.2 11.9 11.6 11.9 12.4 11.8 11.6 11.1
Retention
Story A 8.7 13.0 11.9 11.2 12.0 12.1 11.8 11.9 12.4 11.7 11.8 11.4
Story B 8.3 19.6 17.2 19.3 19.2 21.0 17.1 17.0 19.5 18.5 18.0 17.0
-- -
readings and (b) images relating to sentences of the stories to one another.
These children were also taught to generate relations between the stories
they read and their own experience. As indicated in Table 6, on a test of
comprehensioin of the stories they read, the two experimental classes scored
means of 31 and 29, whereas the control class taught by the children's
regular teacher averaged 22. A second control class, taught by the teacher
of the experimental classes but without using the generative exercises,
averaged 18 on this same test of comprehension. These mean differences are
statistically significant and indicate an increase in comprehension of about
50% due to generative activities, again with time to learn held constant
across all treatments. In this study, the teaching occurred in groups in
realistic classmom settings using conventional reading materials. The
teacher variable was also controlled by using the children's regular teacher
in one control group and the teacher of the experimental or generative
TABLE 5
Means (and Standard Deviations) of the Treatment Groups
Facts Inferences
Treatment (20 Items) (M Items)
Free generationa 14.2* 10.8**
(3.1) (3.0)
Written generationb 13.1 9.3*
(3.2) (3.7)
Yoked controlc 12.1 7.8
(3.2) (3.0)
"n = 30. bn = 35. 'n = 25.
*p < .05, higher than the control group. **p < .01, higher than the control group.
364 WITTROCK
TABLE 6
Means (and Standard Deviations) of the Generation, Retention, and
Comprehension Scores of the Treatment Groups
Number Fact Retention Comprehension
Treatment of Generations (35 Items) (49 Items)
groups in a second control group. The results of this study indicate that
generation of relations between the text and experience, and among the
parts of the text, facilitates comprehension in realistic classroom group
teaching situations.
A series of three applied studies was conducted over a period of 2% years
in basic skills classes taught at four Army bases in California and in Hawaii
(Wittrock & Kelly, 1984). Soldiers with low reading ability, regularly
enrolled in these classes, learned in 9 hr to increase their reading compre-
hension of Army manuals and texts as well as nontechnical materials.
In the first and second of the three studies, five different curricula, each
using paragraphs from Army manuals and from magazines and newspa-
pers, were used in basic skills classes. A comparable control group of
soldiers given customary Army basic skills instruction, taught by regular
basic skills teachers, offered on the same Army bases in the same class-
rooms for the same amount of classroom time, was used to evaluate the
effectiveness of the new materials and teaching procedures. Pretests and
posttests were also given to all experimental and control classes to provide
a second measure of effectiveness of the experimental curricula and the
generative teaching methods.
The soldiers in each of the experimental groups showed statistically
significantlygreater (p < .01) improvement in reading comprehension than
did the soldiers in the control group. The second measure of effectiveness,
the gains from the pretest to the posttest, also showed the same statistically
significant increase ( p < .01) in reading comprehension only in the
experimental treatments. The control treatment showed no gain (see Tables
7 and 8).
TABLE 7
Means, Standard Deviations (in Parentheses), and Gain Scores of the
Experimental and Control Groups of Study 1
Experimental Groups
% of Gain
Treatments Pretest Posttest Gain t P Over Pretest
Imagery 22.2 26.7 +4.5 5.8 .001 20.3
strategya (4.6) (2.7)
Verbal 20.6 23.8 3.2 3.7 .01 15.5
strategyb (5.6) (4.5)
Verbal 24.2
strategy (4.1)
(posttest only)"
Control Groups
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TABLE 8
Means, Standard Deviations (in Parentheses), and Gain Scores of the
Experimental and Control Groups of Study 2
% of Gain
Treatment Pretest Posttest Gain t P Over Pretest
Summaries, 18.9 22.6 +3.7 5.9 .oOol 19.6
headings, and (4.1) (3.9)
inferences
strategya
Metacognitive 20.5 23.1 +2.6 4.2 .001 12.7
strategyb (3.6) (4.2)
Metacognitive ancl 17.9 22.1 4.1 6.7 .oOol 22.9
examples (5.7) (4.6)
strategy"
Control groupC 21.1 20.8 - .3 .4 ns -
(5.4) (5.4)
"n = 29. bn = 26. 'n = 16.
Note. ns = nonsignificant.
366 WITTROCK
In the third study of the series, the curricula and teaching procedures
developed in the first and second studies were rewritten for use with
microcomputers. The rewritten materials were presented by microcom-
puters to regularly enrolled basic skills students at two Army bases in
California. Statistically significant gains in improvement in reading com-
prehension again occurred (see Table 9). In addition, the time needed for
the instruction dropped sizably, from an average of 450 min (nine 50-min
class hours) to an average of 251 min (about five 50-min class hours).
The research indicates that, through generative learning procedures,
reading comprehension can be sizably increased, at no added cost or time,
in typical basic skills classes offered on Army bases by regularly employed
basic skills teachers working with normally enrolled soldiers. Under these
realistic and typical conditions, the reading comprehension instruction and
curricula should teach soldiers how to generate meaning by relating their
knowledge and background to the manuals and other texts they read and by
generating relations among the sentences in the text. These two basic
principles may lead to inexpensive but useful modifications in teaching and
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must not trivialize comprehension. They must involve more than the
learner's short-term memory and more than the surface structure of the
text. They shaillld involve the learner's long-term memory of experience or
the learner's knowledge or both of these. They should involve the text's deep
significance in the construction of one or more of its legitimate meanings.
We have lecwrned through our research studies discussed in the previous
section that we can stimulate the construction of relations having these two
characteristics by designing the reading materials i%ppropriatelyfor the
interests and abilities of the learners and by directing them to generate
meaning for the text as they read. Whether we should make the relevant
relations explicit or ask the learners to construct them is not the central
issue. In either case, so long as we do not trivialize learning, the learners can
and should be actively engaged in the understanding of the relations and in
the text's meaning. When the learners can attend to the task and can
construct the text's meaning or meanings, then they should be givien the
instructions and the direction appropriate for their developmental level,
knowledge, and background. When the learners cannot adequately attend
to the task or cannot construct important meanings from it, they should be
helped to attend to the meaning of the text, and they should be given the
relations to be learned, which they can elaborate on in an attempt to
understand and to remember them.
More precisely, the model implies that when the readers cannot attend to
the text, then training in self-managementtechniques, in cognitive strategies
of focusing attention, and in rehearsal techniques are appropriate ways to
improve the learners' attention, as are appropriate goals and objectives. The
model also imlplies that the text can be changed to provide more interesting
or more appropriate reading materials for the learners' objectives.
When the readers can attend to the text, have the appropriate focus and
knowledge, decoding skills, and vocabulary, but cannot generate the
significant relations discussed in the previous section of this article, then the
relations should be given to the learners in verbal statements or in pictures,
diagrams, graphs, and the like. To avoid trivializing learning, the readers
should not be asked to memorize these verbal statements nor should they be
asked to copy these spatial representations. The readers should be actively
engaged in testing these relations against the parts of the text or against their
knowledge and experience.
When the readers attend to the text, have the appropriate background
and knowledge, decoding skills, and vocabulary, and can but do not
generate legitimate meaning for it, then teachers should teach them learning
strategies and metacognitive processes; question them about its meaning;
give them objectives to attain; ask them to draw pictures; make predictions;
look for main ideas, sequences, cause-and-effect relations; draw inferences;
infer conclusions; construct summaries; make comparisons; and evaluate
the significance of the text. In addition, the text should include metaphors,
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Our studies auld the related research discussed in the previous sections
support the folllowing inferences about the teaching of comprehension.
1 . Types of main ideas and how to generate them. There are different
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types of main ideas. In a narrative, the main ideas often involve under-
standing relations about characters. In other types of discourse, the main
ideas are of a different nature.
2. Story endings. What are the different categories of story endings that
children generate? How do the story endings follow from the earlier text?
How can learners be taught to generate a good story ending?
3. Summaries. The type of summaries that I teach learners to generate
differs from the conventional types of summaries taught in other research
studies or in other curriculum studies. I do not have the readers select or
modify a sentence in the text to construct a summary. Instead, I have them
use only their own words to generate summary sentences that do not appear
in the text but that do relate information from different sentences in the text
and that relate the text to their experience. We need research on the
generation of this type of summary in narration, exposition, and other types
of discourse. We need to study how to teach what a summary does in each
of the different types of discourse.
4. Titles. We need to learn the characteristics of a good title, how to
construct it, how to recognize it, and how to use it.
5. Paragraph headings and subheads. Generation of both of these types
of information facilitates comprehension. We need exercises to teach
students the characteristics of good paragraph headings and subheads and
of ways to construct them.
6. Plot structure. We need to study how to teach students the types of
plot structure, how to recognize them, and how to generate them. We need
more explicit teaching of the types of plot structure, their differences from
each other, and how to construct them.
7. Types ojfparagraphs. Descriptive paragraphs, summary paragraphs,
and the like differ in their functions in a passage. We need to teach students
how to recogruze the function of a paragraph and to generate its contribu-
tion to understanding the text.
8. Functions of similes, metaphors, and analogies. We teach similes and
metaphors, b t ~wet need to teach their essential functions in comprehension,
one of which is to relate previous experience to new events and situations in
order to transfer knowledge from familiar to new situations.
9. Relating past experience to text. This fundarnental process in the
teaching of ca~mprehensionrequires research. It needs to be approached in
a multitude of ways, including explicit teaching of how to adopt different
perspectives, to think of examples, to apply knowledge, and to test
information against what one knows or believes.
10. Generating examples and applications. This is a subhead of 9, but it
deserves speciid attention because of its importance in the teaching of
comprehension^. Many students lack the ability t~omove between the
abstraction and the specific applications, which we should try to develop
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through instruction.
11. Revisin,g stored concepts by reading text. Accommodation of orga-
nized memory is different from assimilating text to memory. It is important
to comprehension of new paradigms and new systems.
12. Relatingpictures to text. The interactive qualities of pictures, that is,
their ability to show relations among the parts they juxtapose (the charac-
ters or the elements of a story or diagram), need to be taught to children.
We also need )to study how to teach them the construction of interactive
images as a way to facilitate memory and comprehension.
13. Asking questions as one reads. Recently, this topic has been widely
studied. It is an important area that involves metacognitive research and the
goals of readiing. It leads into the teaching of metacognitive strategies that
help answer learners' questions about cognition during reading: For exam-
ple, What questions should you ask yourself before you read a text? while
you are reading it? after you finish reading it?
they be generating? What is the best strategy to use to generate the main
idea or another type of relation? What knowledge, schemata, perspective,
or experience is best related to the text? How well are they building relations
between the text and their background knowledge?
To teach them a strategy for reading a story, we need to teach them the
following information. A story has a grammar or a structure, including a
theme, a setting, characters, location, episodes, and a resolution. Some
stories have a structure that begins with a stable situation that is followed by
a change or disruption, a solution to the problem, and a restoration of a
desired state.
Next we need to teach them to ask themselves questions that would direct
their reading toward the progression of events in the story and to organize
its characters and events around the goals, obstacles, and outcomes that
involve the central characters in the development of the plot. We must also
teach them to see a more general significance to the story theme that would
enable them to extract its meaning or implication for their lives. Last of all
we should, if we think it is not too difficult, teach them to evaluate the form
of the story, the importance of its content, and the quality of the affect or
feelings it arouses about oneself, friends, and human emotions.
We also need to teach them to identify the type of discourse; to choose an
appropriate strategy for it; to generate appropriate main ideas, summaries,
themes, and relations between the text and their experience and knowledge.
In expository text, the pattern or relations among the parts is often
different from that found in a narrative. But some of the same generative
techniques are still useful- for example, constructing main ideas, cause-
and-effect relations, summaries, headings, contrasts, inferences, questions
GENERATIVE PROCESSES OF COMPREHENSION 373
sex and IQ, that could be but are not process oriented. They do not help us
greatly to understand the different ways people arcquire knowledge by
organizing experience and by generating relations between experience and
memory. For example, we need to know more about the development of
imagery strategies and verbal strategies. We need tests of what learning
strategies children can use on request at different ages. We also need to
study the strategies we can teach to children at different developmental
levels to facilitate their ability to control attention and to acquire knowl-
edge.
SUMMARY
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