Changing How Students Process and Comprehend Texts with Computer-based Self-Explanation Training

This study assessed whether and how self-explanation reading training, provided by iSTART (Interactive Strategy Training for Active Reading and Thinking), improves the effectiveness of comprehension processes. iSTART teaches students how to self-explain and which strategies will most effectively aid comprehension from moment-to-moment. We used RSAT (Reading Strategy Assessment Tool) to assess how iSTART changes the relation between important selfexplanation reading strategies—bridging and elaboration—and online comprehension, and how often they are produced. College and high school students received iSTART and were administered RSAT prior to and post-training. Results from three experiments showed that iSTART primarily benefits bridging inferences when self explaining. The frequency of bridging inferences was higher post training than prior to training, but only in the experiments involving college students. Additionally, prior to exposure to iSTART, RSAT bridging scores did not predict comprehension performance, whereas they did after iSTART, suggesting that iSTART may improve comprehension processes by teaching students how to appropriately use selfexplanation to address comprehension difficulties. Finally, the results from this study suggest that RSAT may provide a valuable computer-based assessment of the effectiveness of selfexplanations that could be used in conjunction with iSTART and in future research on selfexplanation

Medial Temporal Lobe Volume Predicts Elders’ Everyday Memory

Deficits in memory for everyday activities are common complaints among healthy and demented older adults. The medial temporal lobes and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex are both affected by aging and early-stage Alzheimer’s disease, and are known to influence performance on laboratory memory tasks. We investigated whether the volume of these structures predicts everyday memory. Cognitively healthy older adults and older adults with mild Alzheimer’s-type dementia watched movies of everyday activities and completed memory tests on the activities. Structural MRI was used to measure brain volume. Medial temporal but not prefrontal volume strongly predicted subsequent memory. Everyday memory depends on segmenting activity into discrete events during perception, and medial temporal volume partially accounted for the relationship between performance on the memory tests and performance on an event-segmentation task. The everyday-memory measures used in this study involve retrieval of episodic and semantic information as well as working memory updating. Thus, the current findings suggest that during perception, the medial temporal lobes support the construction of event representations that determine subsequent memory

The role of context in the orientation of perceptual symbols

Includes bibliographical references (pages [40]-45).M.A. (Master of Arts

Aging and the segmentation of narrative film

The perception of event structure in continuous activity is important for understanding and remembering experience. Although the segmentation of experience into events is a normal concomitant of perceptual processing, there are individual differences in how well this segmentation is accomplished. Previous research shows that younger adults tend to segment continuous naturalistic everyday activity, such as someone washing a car, better than older adults. This suggests an age-related impairment in the perception of event structure. However, past research has also shown that older adults have a preserved ability to comprehend events in narrative text, which suggests that narrative may improve the event processing of older adults. This study tested whether there are age-differences in event segmentation at the intersection of continuous activity and narrative: narrative film. In support of the possibility that narrative structure supports event understanding for older adults, we found minimal age-differences in segmentation performance

Individual Differences and the Impact of Forward and Backward Causal Relations on the Online Processing of Narratives

Abstract This paper investigated the impact of causality on reading time by examining the contributions of forward antecedent and backward consequence connections. Undergraduate students read four narrative texts, sentence by sentence. Reading times for each sentence were regressed onto the number of antecedents connecting forward to a sentence and backward to prior sentences. Overall, forward antecedents and backward consequences explained unique variance in reading times, with increases in antecedents and consequences predicting decreases in reading time. However, causal consequences did not contribute unique variance to participants with higher literature knowledge. Further, the presence of forward antecedents significantly attenuated reading time differences in reading skill, and lower knowledge participants read sentences significantly faster than higher knowledge participants when forward antecedents were present. These results suggest that readers track both forward causal antecedents and backward causal consequences in online comprehension