Externalizing Question-Answering Strategies of Good and Poor Comprehenders

Abstract

THIRTY PAIRS of students (one sixth-grade tutor and one fourth-grade tutee in each pair) worked with an expository text and five questions following the text in the presence of an investigator. Under study were number of text lookbacks encouraged by tutors, differentiation of use of lookbacks for text-based versus reader-based questions, and appropriate text sampling. Good comprehender-poor comprehender tutor differences in strategic behavior encouragement were expected. Audiotape data and observational notation data were reduced for a series of analyses of variance; significant differences by reading proficiency level were found for all strategies under test. The tutoring methodology is discussed as a reasonable alternative to traditional (e.g., interview and error detection) methods, as a means of externalizing strategic repertoires of readers.