Self-Generated Questions as an Aid to Reading Comprehension

Self-Generated Questions as an Aid to Reading ComprehensionAuthor(s): Ruth CohenSource: The Reading Teacher, Vol. 36, No. 8 (Apr., 1983), pp. 770-775Published by: Wiley on behalf of the International Reading AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20198324 .

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Self-generated questions as an aid to reading comprehension

This study demonstrates that it is possible to train

elementary students to generate questions for themselves while reading short stories, and that the process of generating questions will enhance reading comprehension.

Ruth Cohen

Effective reading requires active in volvement of the reader in the

reading process. One strategy em

ployed to foster involvement is ques tioning. There is much evidence that the use of questions while reading facilitates learning.

Many studies have investigated the effects of teacher-constructed ques tions?inserted in written text?on

comprehension and recall of details

(Boker, 1974; Bruning, 1968; Felker and Dapra, 1975; Frase, 1967, 1968; Frase, Patrick, and Schumer, 1970; Rothkopf, 1966; Rothkopf and Bis

bicos, 1967; Watts and Anderson, 1971). These studies were concerned

with the characteristics of questions (type, placement, and frequency) that influence learning from prose. In

general, their findings indicate that

adjunct teacher questions can improve prose learning.

More recently, studies have proved the effects of student-generated ques tions on learning. Several techniques

were employed to encourage readers

to generate questions while reading texts, e.g., instruction in generating

questions (Frase and Schwartz, 1975; Helfeldt and Lalik, 1976; Manzo, 1970; Schmelzer, 1975) and instruc tion in devising multiple choice

questions to match instructional ob

jectives (Duell, 1977), studying a manual on how to generate questions about main ideas and instances of ideas (Andre and Anderson, 1978

79), and instruction in knowledge structures and generation of specific questions (Singerand Donlan, 1982). The results indicate that student

generation of questions while reading prose improves comprehension.

In these studies all subjects were

770 The Reading Teacher April 1983



mature readers (high school or college students). There is little evidence that similar strategies are effective with

younger or less able readers.

There are developmental differences in students' abilities to understand or

use various reading monitoring strat

egies. Young and poor readers tend to show little awareness that the

primary goal of reading is to get meaning out of text, and to focus on

decoding rather than making sense of the words decoded (Cannelly and

Winograd, 1979; Johns and Ellis, 1976; Myers and Paris, 1978). Second

grade students have thought that the

purpose of skimming was to read the

easy words, while older readers understood that it was to pick out

important words (Myers and Paris, 1978).

Young readers and older children who are poor readers have compre

hension limitations (Baker and Brown, 1980). For instance, both age and

reading ability influence whether students use text content in a subse

quent class exercise (DiVesta, Hay ward, and Orlando, 1979).

Although young children can

identify the main idea and sequence of events in a simple story, they have

difficulty doing so in more complex prose (Brown and Smiley, 1977; Smiley, Oakley, Worthen, Campione, and Brown, 1977). Developmental differences are also apparent in students' ability to summarize. Young children can delete unnecessary ma

terials but have difficulty using more

complex rules for summarization,

whereas, older students are adept with the rules (Brown and Day,

1980).

A study of training 3rd graders Two questions remain to be answered:

(1) Is it possible to train elementary school students to generate questions

while reading a short story? (2) Will this self-questioning strategy enhance their reading comprehension? Accord

ing to a recent study with 3rd graders,

the answer to both is yes. For this study, I designed pro

grammed instructional material for

training grade school children to

generate questions of the who, when, where, what, how, why category for short stories. The question training

was only directed at the literal level of

comprehension, on the assumption that children must master this class of questions before learning to ask

higher level questions. Future phases of the study will use other question categories.

To select subjects, a pretest of

question generating was given to 60 children in three 3rd grade classes of an urban school in Wisconsin (ages ranged from 8 years 0 months to 8

years 10 months; mean age was 8

years 4 months). On this criterion

test, 12 children demonstrated mastery by scoring 85% or better. The remain

ing 48 children became subjects for the study, assigned randomly to

experimental or control groups within classes.

The training program had two

parts:

I. Training in question generation. (1) Discrimination of questions

from nonquestions: (a) a

question asks for an answer;

(b) a question ends with a

question mark.

(2) Discrimination between a

good question and a poor question: (a) a good ques tion starts with a question

word; (b) a good question can be answered by the

story; (c) a good question asks about an important detail of the story.

(3) Production of good ques tions for short paragraphs.

II. Application of questioning skills to reading short stories.

(1) Read the story to answer the question: "What is the

story about?"

(2) Generate two good questions for the story.

Self-generated questions 771



(3) Read to answer the ques tions.

(4) For each question that cannot be answered by the

story, generate a new good

question. The first section of the program

included six separate booklets, each with two lessons. Feedback on per formance was provided by a foldout answer sheet at the end of each lesson.

The second section was a booklet in outline form. It gave the steps to follow in reading a story, an example of the process, and four short stories. Each story was followed by a page of

"good" questions that could have been constructed for that story.

The instructional materials included a pre-post criterion test and a stan

dardized test. The criterion test included five short stories. The sub

jects were first asked to answer the

question "What is the story about?" and then to generate two good questions for each story. The stan

dardized test consisted of one example, four paragraphs, and two compre

hension questions for each paragraph. The items in this subtest were taken from the Developmental Reading Tests (Bond-Clymer-Hoyt) Upper Primary Reading, Form UG-A, Gen eral Comprehension Section.

The purpose of the latter component of the test was to assess whether prior training in question generation while

reading stories will also affect the children's performance on a conven

tional reading comprehension test

(i.e., reading stories and then answer

ing comprehension questions). On the first day of the study (one

week after the pretest), I met the three experimental groups outside their classrooms to introduce the

training program. The question gen

erating booklets were given to the 24

participants. (One child later became ill and was dropped from the study.) I

worked through one example with the children and explained how to

use the foldout answer sheet. From day two, the experimental

groups worked on the program

independently at the back of their classrooms during a specified time

period. The control groups received no supplemental instruction. When the experimental groups were working on the program, the control groups continued their work right along with the other children in the class. One period of about 15 minutes on 6 consecutive days was devoted to the first part of training.

I met again with the experimental groups outside their classrooms to introduce them to Section II of the

program. The children later worked

independently in their classrooms for 20 minutes on each of 4 consecutive

days. Each day, the students read one short story and generated two ques tions. Their questions were scored by their teachers, using a key based on the steps from Section I. (For example, the question asks for an answer = 1

point; it ends with a question mark =

1 point.) The children received daily feedback on their performance.

On the last day, the posttest (same as pretest) was given to the experi

mental and control groups.

Throughout the study, I handled student difficulties on an individual basis. The answers to the criterion

test were scored with the key mentioned

above, each answer receiving up to 5

points, to a maximum total of 55

points. Students' questions were also

graded by two independent judges to check the reliability of the scoring system; there were no cases of

disagreement between judges. The criterion goal was that 85% of

the children in the experimental groups would achieve 85% accuracy (47 points) on the criterion subtest of the posttest.

Successful training On the criterion test, which asked the 3rd graders to say what the story was about and then to generate two




Percentage of correct responses on criterion test

Experimental group

Percent of

Correct

Response

Pretest

Posttest

Mastery

20 24 STUDENTS

Control group

Percent of

Correct

Response

Pretest

Posttest

Mastery

10 15 20 24 STUDENTS




questions about it, the experimental group achieved the prestated criterion

goal. The experimental group scored

56% correct (20 points) on the criterion pretest and 87% correct (48

points) on the posttest. After training, 87% of these third graders (20 out of

23) demonstrated mastery by scoring 85% correct (47 points) or better on

the posttest. In contrast, the control

groups' scores stayed about the

same?they scored 36% (20 points) correct on the criterion pretest and

38% correct (21 points) on the posttest. No subject in the control group demonstrated mastery on the posttest.

On the standardized comprehension test, which asked the students to answer comprehension questions after

reading short stories, the experimental group scored 74.5% correct on the

pretest and 88% correct on the

posttest. The control group had

74.5% correct on the pretest and

74.5% correct on the posttest. A graph showing the percentage

of correct responses is shown in the

Figure. An examination of each group's

mean number of errors on the

standard achievement test revealed

large differences on pre-to-post score

performance. The mean number of

errors for the experimental group changed from 2.09 (S.D.

= 1.69) on

the pretest to 1.00 (S. D. = .88) on the

posttest. By comparison, the mean

number of errors for the control

group remained 2.04 for both the pre and posttest (S.D.

- 1.93 and 1.82).

Discussion

My instructional materials trained children to generate questions, aiming at the literal level of reading compre hension. Significant gains in all three

experimental groups indicate that it is possible to train 3rd graders to

generate these types of questions while reading short stories. However,

further studies are needed to inves

tigate the effect of training in self

generation of higher level questions.

Significant gains on the standardized test as well as the criterion test indicate that training in question generating can enhance comprehen sion. In order to succeed on the criterion test the students were required to generate good comprehension questions. This necessitated deter

mining main ideas and important details and transforming them into

questions. Thus, the improved per formance on the criterion test may also indicate improvement in the

ability to analyze the text and re

trieve important information from it.

The fact that performance in the

experimental groups' standard test scores improved significantly may be

important; it could mean that although the children were not instructed to

generate questions while reading the test items, they did so spontaneously.

Through a training in question gen erating they may have acquired an

effective study strategy which improved their information processing skills.

This point should be verified with more subjects.

Instruction in effective study and

reading techniques, such as Robinson's

SQ3R (survey, question, read, recite, and review, 1946) is often postponed until high school, when students

reading and learning habits are

already well established; changing bad habits at this stage may be very difficult. It appears that self-generating strategies can be taught effectively in the formative years of learning and

reading, as early as primary grades. The self-questioning study technique

used here proved beneficial to 3rd

graders with varying entry skills. Evidence shows significant gains by children who scored 0 points on the criterion test as well as by children

scoring up to 40 points (73%). Note that some children were excluded from the study because they demon strated mastery on the criterion

pretest. This group apparently had

already acquired the metacognitive skills incorporated in the self-ques




tioning study strategy. The remaining children might have improved their

performance because they were "asked to use a study strategy which is more effective than the one they would

normally use"(Andre and Anderson, 1978-79). This result seems to confirm the results obtained by Andre and

Anderson.

In summary, these findings suggest that training in self-generation of

questions can start as early as the

primary grades and that this type of

training may improve students' com

prehension of stories.

Cohen is Director of Educational Services with the Milwaukee Asso ciation for Jewish Education in

Wisconsin.

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Self-Generated Questions as an Aid to Reading Comprehension