CHILDRENS RECOGNITION OF INCONSISTENCIES IN SCIENCE TEXTS - MULTIPLE MEASURES OF COMPREHENSION MONITORING

The goal of this research was to compare various indices of problem detection in children's comprehension monitoring of science passages. Three experiments were conducted with third and fifth grade students who were asked to review paragraph descriptions of unusual plants and report difficulties in understanding the material. Half of the paragraphs contained contradictory information concerning familiar and unusual plants, whereas the apparent inconsistencies were explained in the remaining paragraphs. Children were asked to report their comprehension problems (Experiments 1-3), and to suggest additional information to include or remove to improve the comprehensibility of the paragraphs (Experiments 1 and 2). Measures of children's reading behaviour were also collected (Experiment 3). The results showed that although there was some evidence that children discriminated between the clear and inconsistent paragraphs, in general, children significantly overestimated how well they understood the new information about the unusual plants.