Teaching Comprehension: Stopping too Short

I'm reading: Understanding and Teaching Reading Comprehension: A Handbook, bu Jane Oakhill, Kate Cain, and Carsten Elbro. Join the conversation at: https://www.facebook.com/R16Book/ and see the reading guide for the book here.

The authors speak of an experiment done by Sachs in 1967. In Cognitive Sciences: An Introduction, we can read more about the experiment. They list the actual sentences subjects were given. 

 

I may or may not try to replicate this during a dinner party. LOL 

 

The nonlinguistic "gist" is the overall meaning the reader/listener takes from the text. That's their mental model of the text. Since that goes beyond the literal meaning of the text, that's why readers can get mixed up in their minds about whet the text says. Most readers monitor this unconsciously. As teachers, we need to teach kids how to do this work. On page 12, the authors recommend these approaches: 

• Narrative: 
• Identify the main characters
• Examine their MOTIVES
• Track the motives through the plot structure
• Compare to schema/background
• ID what areas of the text are in conflict or new to existing schema
• Question, Search/Research, and Adjust Schema
• Expository
• Identify the topic
• Follow the argument structure
• Extract main ideas
• Compare to schema/background
• ID what areas of the text are in conflict or new to existing schema
• Question, Search/Research, and Adjust Schema

I think we are doing the first parts of this. But I don't think we are going far enough with the last two bullets. Comprehension Monitoring, y'all. Kylene Beers and Bob Probst pinpoint this concept in their big Questions: What surprised you? What challenged, changed, or confirmed what I already knew? What did the author think I already knew? The problem comes when we STOP there. Answering the three big questions isn't enough. We must do something about those answers. 

I guess what I'm saying is that we are still stopping too soon. Our instruction has to go beyond identification and into action. What would happen if our lessons were about those last bullets: Question, Search/Research, and Adjust Schema?