The Effects of Strategic Processing in Reading upon Inference Generation and Comprehension

The Effects of Strategic Processing in Reading upon Inference Generation and Comprehension

The aim of the present study was to assess the types of inference events readers make under different reading strategy instructions, and to examine the relation of these processes to the memory operations and the resulting memory representations. 36 college students read two informational, expository texts of which one was relatively easier and the other was relatively harder. Think-aloud protocols were collected as participants read the texts, one sentence at a time. Two off-line measures, writing a recall report and a recognition test of factual and inferential statements, were used. 3 types of reading instructions were reading to summarize, reading to memorize, and reading to understand well to write a report after reading texts. The resuls showed, first, that readers with different reading instruction produced different types of inference events and they seemed to have control of processing types; second, explanatory elaborations are vital in understanding; third, text difficulty generated different adaptive types of inference events suggesting reader's flexibility and strategic processing; and, fourth, the memory operations were also adaptive depending upon reading strategy used. Finally, the educational and developmental implications of the results obtained were discussed.