McNamara - 2004 - SERT

referenceArchiveUUID: "6dabcb80-4122-47ad-bdb3-4d3a27fe1fdc"
fullTitle: "SERT: Self-explanation reading training"
authors: ["Danielle McNamara"]

RCT with treatment students receiving explicit training in Self-explanation skills associated with more skillful readers. This training helps readers with lower prior domain knowledge as measured by text-based comprehension questions, but doesn’t help higher-domain-knowledge readers, and doesn’t help with questions which require bridging inference (~near Transfer learning).

The main finding here suggests that facilitating self-explanation is only useful for text-level questions, and only for low-knowledge readers. If that’s true, then this seems much less exciting as a direction. That said, looking at the graph, it’s not clear to me that there isn’t an effect on bridging questions for high-knowledge readers; maybe the sample size is just too small (N=42). Searching a bit, it seems that iSTART (2006) finds benefits even for high-knowledge readers.

Q. Main finding?
A. Training helps readers with lower prior domain knowledge as measured by text-based comprehension questions, but doesn’t help higher-domain-knowledge readers, and doesn’t help with questions which require bridging inference ☉

Q. Six strategies?
A. Comprehension monitoring, paraphrase, bridging inference, elaboration, using logic, prediction ☉

Q. Which strategies were included in the “self-explanation score”?
A. elaboration, logic, prediction, comprehension monitoring (i.e. going beyond the text) ☉

Q. What’s meant by “using logic” as a self-explanation strategy?
A. Using domain-general knowledge and common sense to go beyond the sentence; meant to distinguish from elaboration and distant bridging inferences, which are expected to rely on domain-specific knowledge. ☉

Q. Paper’s explanation of how, mechanically, training helped low-domain-knowledge readers?
A. Encouraged them to use domain-general techniques (“logic”) to make more inferences. These techniques are less relevant to higher-knowledge readers. ☉

Q. Papers explanation of why training didn’t help readers with high domain knowledge?
A. The low-cohesion text naturally causes them to make inferences, and they’re able to do it because of their prior knowledge. ☉

Q. Target text?
A. A ~600 word text on cellular mitosis, intentionally modified to have low cohesion. ☉

Q. How does the experimental design avoid simply measuring the effect of cueing self-explanation, like Chi et al. - 1994 - Eliciting self-explanations improves understanding?
A. The control group gets an introduction to self-explanation right before reading the target text, but doesn’t get instruction on strategies. So the results are presumed to measure the effect of teaching specific strategies. ☉

Q. Correlations between reading span / skill and comprehension performance?
A. Null. ☉

Q. How did use of bridging inferences as a strategy relate to comprehension performance?
A. Only distant bridging improved performance, not “near” bridging. ☉

Q. Which strategies were more clearly associated with stronger comprehension scores?
A. elaboration, using logic, and (via post-hoc) distant bridging inferences (“going beyond the text by making connections to prior knowledge or distant ideas is essential to deep comprehension”) ☉