Comprehension Monitoring

1. Comprehension Monitoring Donna Alvermann, Ph.D. Department of Language & Literacy Education University of Georgia PowerPoint by Achariya Rezak

2. What is Comprehension Monitoring? • Comprehension monitoring describes a reader's metacognitive strategies for constructing a text’s meaning during the process of reading (Ruddell, 2006). Metacognition is a reader’s awareness of cognitive processes of comprehension during reading. • Also called metamemory for text, calibration of comprehension, and metacomprehension, comprehension monitoring is a process by which the evaluation and regulation of reading comprehension occurs (Hacker, 2005).

3. Evaluation and regulation: • Comprehension monitoring works in two parts: the evaluation of ongoing comprehension, and the regulation of comprehension issues. • Evaluation and regulation are simultaneous actions that first evaluate a reader’s understanding of the text, and then attempt to regulate the comprehension failure by engaging cognitive strategies.

4. The cognitive level of comprehension monitoring is an almost unconscious level of awareness that contains within it strategies for coping with texts, standards for text evaluation, and world knowledge related to the text. The metacognitive level describes readers’ awareness of their own cognitive processes, and also assesses whether progress is being made toward their goals. Metacognition is somewhat like controlling a lower-level thought process with a higher-level one. But the direction of control is not one-way: cognitive and metacognitive processes inform each other. Cognition and metacognition in comprehension monitoring

5. How comprehension monitoring works • Comprehension occurs when readers derive understanding from a text through constructing an internal representation of the text. • Comprehension is made up of many levels, including a verbal level with syntactical units, one with text propositions (semantic units), one containing world knowledge, one related to the overall gist of the text, and others. • Readers set goals before or during reading. Most often the goal is to identify the text’s main idea. Readers metacognitively evaluate their progress toward this goal during reading.

6. Evaluation • Readers monitor similarities and differences between their cognitive representation of a text and their metacognitive model of the text. • Similarities indicate that comprehension is occurring, and differences are a sign that comprehension has failed. • Readers can then exert control over texts to identify the difference and reestablish a representation of the text. The strategy that will be invoked depends upon the reader's metacognitive understanding of the source of the problem and the actions that can resolve it. • Finally, the reader must evaluate whether the problem has been resolved, or whether more strategies need to be utilized.

7. Clicks and clunks • One strategy for aiding a reader's comprehension of a text is the metacognitive strategy of "clicks and clunks.” • Teachers ask students to stop at the end of every passage and question whether the meaning of the passage clicks or clunks. A click happens when readers can clearly translate the meaning of the passage into their own words. A clunk happens when they cannot. • When a passage clunks, readers are encouraged to question why comprehension has not occurred. Often, further exploration of these questions can aid understanding.

8. Strategies for comprehension monitoring • Cognitive strategies (drawn upon by metacognitive cues) that can help rebuild comprehension fall into two categories: monitoring strategies and control strategies. • Monitoring strategies relate to a person’s prior knowledge, and involve re-reading the text, looking back to prior texts, predicting, and comparing texts. • Control strategies are text-oriented, such as summarizing texts, clarifying texts, or correcting texts.

9. SQ3R • One way to help readers improve their metacognitive interaction with a text is to scaffold their reading experience with SQ3R. SQ3R is a strategy in which readers Survey, Question, Read, Recite, and Review a text. • The steps are: • Survey: Preview a selection by reading titles, headings, and other highlighted information. • Question: Turn each title heading caption into a question. • Read: Read to answer these questions. • Recite: Close the text & orally summarize the reading. Then take notes. • Review: Read through notes.

10. Example Directions: Using SQ3R, survey the following text from the Equality and Social Studies Education handout by reading the headings and titles. Turn each heading into a question. Read the rest of the text and focus on the questions you've formed. After you're done, orally summarize the reading, and jot down some notes about it. These notes can be used for review. Equality and Social Studies Education Teaching civic duty and cultural understanding The NCSS Curriculum Standards website (n.d.) emphasizes the civic duty component of Social Studies classrooms. Teachers are encouraged to teach a particular value system to students that is "central to our way of life and view of the common good" (¶ 32), and that emphasizes "fundamental rights as the right to life, liberty, individual dignity, equality of opportunity, justice, privacy, security, and ownership of private property" (¶ 32) as well as "the basic freedoms of worship, thought, conscience, expression, inquiry, assembly, and participation in the political process" (¶ 32). But equally important to instilling one particular set of values in students is to instill the somewhat contradictory notion that other cultures have entirely different ways of life and views of the common good. Students’ multiple identities The NCSS website emphasizes that students should closely examine these values and come to their own understanding about their place in different cultures, especially regarding the concept of equality. The goal of the Social Studies curriculum is to build students' identities beyond simply that of a citizen of one nation, emphasizing their multiple roles as "members of groups, communities, societies, and nations—that is, as part of a dynamic world community" (NCSS website, ¶ 21), and to "help each learner construct a blend of personal, academic, pluralist, and global views of the human condition" (NCSS website, ¶ 21).

11. Summary • Comprehension monitoring describes a reader's cognitive and metacognitive strategies for understanding texts. • Metacognitive evaluation calls upon cognitive strategies such as monitoring strategies and control strategies to aid in rebuilding comprehension.

12. References • Best, R. M., McNamara, D. S., Ozuru, Y., & Rowe, M. (2005). Deep-level comprehension of science texts: The role of the reader and the text. Topics in Language Disorders, 25, 65-83. • Hacker, D. J. (2004). Self-regulated comprehension during normal reading. In Ruddell, R.B. & Unrau, N.J. (Eds.), Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading (5th Edition) (pp. 755-779). Newark, DE: International Reading Association. • Ruddell, R. B. (2006). Teaching children to read and write. Boston: Pearson Education.