Andyʼs working notes

About these notes

Reading comprehension

I’m mostly interested in adult reading comprehension, particularly of difficult explanatory texts. Scattered notes:

  • People often struggle to remember details of prose text because they never processed them in the first place
    • (see 2023-06-30, 2023-08-01, 2023-08-31 patron letters)

Interventions:

  • Adjunct questions
    • Reading comprehension questions can uncover textbase holes
    • Reading comprehension questions are unpleasant
    • Textbook problem sets aren’t great reading comprehension checks
    • Adjunct questions improve comprehension of related but untested content
    • The mnemonic medium may push readers to read more slowly and attentively
  • Self-explanation
    • Elaborative verbal rehearsal
    • iSTART
    • McNamara, D. (2004). SERT: Self-explanation reading training. Discourse Processes, 38(1), 1–30
  • Prompt-writing supports reading comprehension
Last updated 2023-11-21.