Comprehension Theory as a Guide for the Design of Thoughtful Questions

Abstract

This article begins with a brief overview of the psychological research on the pedagogical efficacy of questions and describes how recent research has led to a reevaluation of the role of questions within the framework of a theoretical model of discourse comprehension processes and knowledge representation. A computer-based tutor for reading comprehension under development by our research team is described. The tutor uses an interactive books interface to present a structured sequence of questions to elicit summaries from young readers. The students receive feedback on content coverage by means of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). The questions in the tutor are based on the principled guidelines presented in the final section of this article.