Chapter 7, page 137
Comprehension Strategies
In this section, we will discuss several of the strategies that are particularly useful to help students’
improve their comprehension of texts and lectures. These strategies are monitoring understanding, repairing
understanding, using text structure, summarizing, elaborating, explaining, and formulating problems.
Monitoring understanding. When students monitor understanding, they check as they go along to
make sure they understand what they are learning (Donndelinger, 2005; Yang, 2006).. This is a specific
version of self-monitoring applied to the task of understanding a text or lecture. Good learners are much
better at monitoring understanding than poor learners. Many of the studies on monitoring have had students
read passages such as this one (Markman, 1979):
Many different kinds of fish live in the ocean. Some fish have heads that make them look like
alligators, and some fish have heads that make them look like cats. Fish live in different parts of
the ocean. Some fish live near the surface of the water, but some fish live way down at the bottom
of the ocean. There is absolutely no light at the bottom of the ocean. Some fish that live at the
bottom of the ocean know their food by its color. They will only eat red fungus.Did you notice any inconsistencies in this passage? If not, then you failed to monitor your comprehension
fully because there is an internal contradiction in the passage. If there is absolutely no light at the bottom
of the ocean, then it is impossible to identify food by its color. In Markman’s (1979) study, almost all
children in grades 3, 5, and 6 failed to notice this contradiction. Even when the passage was more explicit
and read, “[the fish] cannot even see colors. Some fish that live at the bottom of the ocean can see the color
of their food,” no more than 60% of the children at any grade level noticed the inconsistency. Proficiency at
monitoring understanding so that one can notice inconsistencies like this one improves with age as well as
with reading proficiency (Rubman & Waters, 2000).
Monitoring comprehension is at the heart of effective learning. Comprehension requires learners to
set goals to understand the material and to check understanding as they go along. Poor learners often fail to
do so. However—and this is very important—poor learners sometimes think they understand, even though
they don’t. Think back to the study with the physics students who studied the worked examples discussed
earlier in this chapter. Recall that it was the students who understood least who asserted that they
understood the problems (Chi et al., 1989).
Repairing understanding. Repair strategies (sometimes called fix-up strategies) are strategies that
students use to overcome problems with memory or understanding (Schmitt, 2005). When proficient
learners find that they don’t understand something, they take steps to try to overcome their lack of
understanding. In particular, they spend more time studying the more difficult material, whereas less
proficient learners may spend the same amount of time on difficult material as on easy material (Owings et
al., 1980). Effective learners are more likely simply to look back and reread what they don’t understand
(Alessi, Anderson, & Goetz, 1979; Garner & Reis, 1981).
The following example presents a very simple task. Study the list of nonsense syllables below for 45
seconds. Your task is to remember as many of them as you can.
vox baj lin fub wep muv sot dih yok waf tiz cov seg nud zib gak rux loq hap mes
Now, cover up the words and try to write down all the syllables you can remember. When you finish, study
the syllables one more time, again for 45 seconds. Then do one more recall of the entire list. If you are like
most undergraduates, when you studied the syllables the second time, you spent more time on the syllables
that you got wrong than the syllables that you got right. Although this is a memory task rather than a
comprehension task, it illustrates a strategy useful for repairing both memory errors and comprehension
errors--spending more time on the things you don’t know.