Testing Lecture Comprehension Through Listening-to-summarize Cloze Tasks

The second participant here mixed difficulty and failure together. Though they
may both pose challenge to learners, but the relevant information centres upon
learners’performance in stead of the learning task. The inference is already highly
relevant, but because the critical piece of information has eluded the participant, she
stillfilled“difficulty”in the blank.
The third participant was quite certain about her answer“failure”which was
derived from“I think it concerns mistakes”and then concluded“failure is better”.
She interpreted the sentence as“...passive learners don’t change, they remain the
same even if they make mistakes”. It proves that the third participant had the
retention of the most relevant piece of information“their performance is poor”.On
the other hand, the meaning was successfully constructed when she was hearing the
lecture and the connections between the relevant idea units are constructed this
way:
The relevant audio input of the mini-lecture is:“When active learners don’t
perform as well as they had hoped, they evaluate why they didn’t do well, and
change those studying behaviors the next time. Passive learners on the other hand,
often approach every course in the same manner and then get angry with professors
when their performance is poor”. Here, the key should be poor performance,
unsatisfactory, bad performance, or failure, at least a word negative in connotation,
as a summary of“don’t perform as well as they had hoped”or“when their per-
formance is poor”. It shows that active learners and passive learners hold opposite
attitude toward their unsatisfactory performance. It’s hard to depict how informa-
tion is retained in listeners’mind. Actually, we cannot make a full picture of all the
connections in the participant’s mind, but what is salient here is the connections
regarding passive learners (see Fig.6.4), which assists the participant infilling the
gap. Again, the salient connections of idea units are available for quicker retrieval.
For the gaps intended for inferencing ability, the source of inference really
matters. Thefirst two protocols reflected inferences from participants’background
knowledge. The reasoning makes some sense but fails to help themfill in the gap
with a correct answer because those inferences are not material-bound. The third

failure

passive learners

make mistakes

don’t change

active learners

evaluate and change

Fig. 6.4 Association of idea units in Fan’s TAP.....................

102 6 Employing the Think-Alound Method...