Reading History: Moving from Memorizing Facts to Critical Thinking

Abstract

Reading comprehension involves a reader developing a mental represen-tation of a text through the establishment of causal relations based on the ideas and events in the text. This is especially relevant to scientific text comprehension. Causal relations are fundamental to the process of comprehension as they provide a framework or scaffolding to order information in a logical way that is consistent with the argument. The most common method of assessing comprehension is based on the reader answering a series of multiple choice questions. It is unusual for comprehension measures to use an open task such as a summary. However, summaries require the reader to use writing skills as well as those of comprehension, thus revealing wide individual differences among students. This gives rise to two questions: (a) up to what point is a summary a reflection of the causal structure of a text, and (b) what—if any—is the influence of the causal relations on the comprehension of more competent and less competent readers? In this chapter we analyze the causal structure of scientific texts, as opposed to that of narratives, and explore how high school students process and comprehend these causal relations. We also examine how students' comprehension of causal relations can be evaluated by multiple choice tasks or open tasks such as summaries. Finally, we discuss some educational implications for improving comprehension in science.