THE RELATIONSHIP OF YOUNG CHILDREN'S PRIOR BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE TO THEIR COMPREHENSION OF TEXTUALLY EXPLICIT, TEXTUALLY IMPLICIT AND SCRIPTALLY IMPLICIT QUESTIONS FOR EXPOSITORY AND NARRATIVE PASSAGES

PATRICIA T BOOTH, Purdue University

Abstract

The two-part study was designed to investigate the role that prior background knowledge plays in determining the ability to process relationships which require a subject's prior knowledge, and to compare relationships that are explicitly or implicitly specified in narrative and expository passages. Thirty-six third-grade students with reading grade equivalent scores between 3.4 - 5.2 participated in Part 1 of the study. All subjects, previously tested for prior knowledge, read a randomly assigned narrative or expository passage and were tested for reading comprehension. Reading comprehension performance was compared to investigate the effects of textually explicit, textually implicit, and scriptally implicit questions on a narrative versus an expository passage. An analysis of variance indicated a significant within-subjects main effect for question type. Post-hoc analyses revealed that scriptally implicit questions were significantly harder to answer than textually explicit or textually implicit questions. Also, textually explicit questions were not necessarily easier to answer than textually implicit questions. There were no significant differences in the subjects' reading comprehension performance on an expository passage compared to a narrative passage. A regression analysis indicated a significant relationship between prior knowledge scores and scriptally implicit scores for narrative passage readers, but not for expository passage readers. There was no significant relationship between prior knowledge scores and textually explicit or textually implicit scores. Twenty-four third-grade students with reading grade equivalent scores between 3.4 - 5.2 participated in Part 2 of the study. All subjects read one of four randomly assigned narrative or expository passages and were tested for reading comprehension. Reading comprehension performance was compared to investigate the effects of textually explicit and scriptally implicit questions on two narrative versus two expository passages. An analysis of variance indicated that scriptally implicit questions were significantly harder to answer than textually explicit questions. There were no significant differences in the subjects' reading comprehension performance on the expository passages compared to the narrative passages.

Degree

Ph.D.

Subject Area

Literacy|Reading instruction

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