Reading

Text allows people to communicate their ideas with one another across time and space. Indeed, a large part of what each person knows comes from reading texts. People who never discover how to learn from text have strong constraints on what they can know and do. On careful reflection, however, learning from text is a more controversial topic than is readily obvious. Learning may be of higher quality when students experience the world directly rather than read about it. Fourth graders who construct electric circuits or twelfth graders who enact a mock trial may well understand more about the underlying principles of electricity or the judicial system than if they had read chapters from their science or social studies textbooks. As appealing as learning by doing may seem, it has its own limitations. It is unrealistic to assume that students would be able to acquire the understanding of electricity that the nineteenth-century German physicist Georg Ohm had or the understanding of the law that John Marshall, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835, had by repeating the same school activities even countless times. Through reading, students can experience the thinking of these experts and come to know some of what they knew or know without completing the same years of study or possessing equal amounts of academic insight. Successful learning depends on a close match among reader goals, text characteristics, reader proficiencies, and instructional context.

Reader Goals

People read for many reasons. A mystery lover reads a new novel to be intrigued and entertained. A cook reads a recipe to prepare a new dish successfully. A caller reads the telephone book to find a telephone number. The mystery lover, cook, and caller will have connected the words, sentences, and paragraphs of their texts together to be entertained, follow the set of prescribed steps, or locate the information they seek. In other words, they will have comprehended successfully. Nevertheless, they probably will not have learned much. The goal of the mystery lover is to be entertained, not to learn. While the cook and caller read to find information, this information probably will remain in the text where it can be accessed again when needed rather than become a part of each reader's knowledge.

Comprehension, memorizing, and learning require different processes and different amounts of effort. Walter Kintsch, a cognitive psychologist who has studied text comprehension and learning, has shown that children can comprehend, or recall, an arithmetic problem without being able to solve it correctly and that adults can recall a set of directions without being able to find a particular location. To comprehend, readers connect the separate ideas in a text into a coherent whole that resembles the text. They know the meanings of most words and are able to draw necessary inferences between sentences, paragraphs, and larger sections of a text. As they draw these inferences, they distinguish superordinate topics or ideas from details. If asked to recall a text soon after reading it, they will tend to remember the superordinate topics, but not the details.

Memorizing requires rehearsal and therefore more effort than comprehension. Readers who re-read a text several times, focusing attention on the superordinate ideas and some of the details, will be better able to reproduce what they have rehearsed, particularly if prompted. Memorization is often what students do when they study for an exam. If the test has multiple choice or true and false questions, memorization can be an effective strategy. Neither text comprehension nor memorization alone, however, will result in learning, according to Kintsch.

Kintsch found that children were able to solve a problem if they could apply what they know about arithmetic and life in general to imagine a situation that represents the details in the problem. He suggested that learning occurs when readers can use their own relevant knowledge to think about, perhaps rearrange, critique, and retain or discard the content in a text. Picture the master chef following a new recipe for a type of dish that she has cooked many times. Because of her knowledge about ingredients, preparation choices, cooking temperatures, and heat sources, this chef would notice any new features, critique the recipe, keep what she likes, and add to what she already knows about preparing the dish. Learning brings about a change in what readers know, understand, and can do rather than simply what they remember or comprehend.

Texts for Learning

Learning requires more from a text than comprehensibility. To be sure, comprehensibility serves as a gatekeeper. Readers who comprehend a text have a chance at learning from it. Those who fail to comprehend will learn little without substantial intervention from the teacher. Centuries of scholarship on the features of effective writing accompanied by decades of comprehension research have revealed the characteristics of comprehensible text. Organization is important. Coherent texts are easier to comprehend than incoherent, poorly organized texts. In coherent texts sentences and paragraphs are organized around clear subtopics, and the overall text follows a well-known genre, such as argument or explanation. If the text has introductions, transitions, conclusions, paragraph topic sentences, and signal words that highlight this organization, readers will comprehend it better than they will a text without these features. In addition to organization, comprehension is affected by familiarity and interestingness. Readers comprehend texts better that are maximally informative, neither too familiar nor too unfamiliar, and that include vivid details and examples to capture interest. As important as text comprehensibility is, however, it does not address what students will learn from their reading or whether they will learnanything at all.

What is worth learning? The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead saw in schooling the potential to teach important understandings that students could use to make sense of the chaotic stream of events that make up experience. In his 1974 book The Organisation of Thought, he warned educators, "Do not teach too many subjects, [and] what you teach, teach thoroughly, seizing on the few general ideas which illuminate the whole, and persistently marshalling subsidiary facts round them" (Whitehead, p. 3.) The difficulty, of course, arises in choosing the few understandings to teach.

Ralph W. Tyler, in his classic 1949 book Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, proposed five types of important understandings. First, subject specialists believe that the major understandings should come from the design of the knowledge domains themselves. Second, progressives and child psychologists maintain that the goal of education is to produce well-adjusted adults and that student needs should guide the choice of understandings. Third, sociologists, aware of the needs of society, argue that the understandings should be based on whatever the pressing societal problems are; the goal of schooling is to produce good citizens. Fourth, educational philosophers point to important basic life values as a guide, because they believe that the goal of education is to produce an ethical populace. Fifth, educational psychologists explain that the understandings must be developmentally appropriate; the goal of schooling is to teach something. No curriculum could effectively incorporate everything worthwhile. Therefore, Tyler suggested that curriculum designers use their philosophy of education and what they know about educational psychology to decide which understandings to include from student needs, society needs, and the domain.

Besides being comprehensible and presenting valuable content, certain types of texts are intentionally instructional, designed specifically to enhance reader learning. Argument and explanation, two familiar genres, are particularly effective instructional text types. Both genres marshal subsidiary facts around general ideas, the optimal instructional approach for teaching important understandings according to Whitehead. Argument offers facts and examples to support a claim, or general statement. Twelfth graders studying the judiciary might read a text that presents details about court decisions in order to argue, "Through its decisions, the Supreme Court has a major influence on how the trials in lower courts are conducted." Explanation presents facts, examples, illustrations, and analogies ordered logically to guide a reader from an everyday understanding toward the understanding of an expert. Fourth graders might read an explanation of electricity that introduces the scientific model of electric circuits. The explanation could begin by describing the everyday experience of turning a light switch on and off. Next it could present the steps for building a simple circuit and examples of circuits that light lamps, houses, and entire towns. The explanation could display diagrams with arrows that show how electricity moves in each of the circuits. It could conclude with a description of the atomic model and accompanying diagrams. Text features can substantially affect student learning.

Reader Characteristics

In order to comprehend a text, integrate the ideas in the text with what they already know and understand, and then construct a model of the situation in the text, readers must be able to capitalize on a text's comprehensibility and instructional features. Reader knowledge is crucial. Readers who are familiar with a text's topic can rely on what they know to recognize important ideas and distinguish them from details. They can readily identify the meanings of familiar words in the text and can use what they already know to infer the meanings of unknown words. If they also know common text patterns and how they are signaled in introductions, conclusions, transitions, and topic sentences, readers can connect the separate ideas in the text into a coherent whole that resembles the text. Knowledge about arguments and explanations may be particularly important. Readers who expect to recognize and learn new ideas from reading these two genres will be far more likely to learn the ideas than readers who are oblivious to them.

But learning requires special reading strategies beyond what readers must know to be able to comprehend. In a 1997 article Susan R. Goldman, a cognitive psychologist, reviewed the extensive work on learning strategies, including some of her own work. She concluded that readers who explain and elaborate what they are reading and who have flexible comprehension strategies learn more from reading than readers who do not. The effective explainers actively search for the logical relationships among the ideas in a text. Thinking about the relationships reminds successful learners of related facts and examples from their own knowledge. These strategies lead readers to construct a model of the situation in the text closely intertwined with what they already know.

The Learning Context

Contexts that effectively promote learning from text set learning as the goal for reading, provide students with comprehensible and "learnable" texts, draw connections between student knowledge and reading, and support and promote student thinking about text. Students may read to complete tasks, to understand activities more fully, to teach ideas to one another, to figure out the important ideas in a text, and to prepare reports, arguments, and explanations. Each of these learning goals requires that readers connect the ideas in the texts to what they already know. Teachers can promote connections by brainstorming with the students, reminding them of relevant experiences in and outside of class, encouraging them to read from several related texts, and pairing reading and experiential activities. Learning also requires readers to search for the logical relationships among ideas in a text. Contexts that encourage students to formulate questions, summarize, explain, construct graphic organizers, and apply generic writing patterns teach students to seek out and identify the logical organization in a text. Because these strategies require conscious effort, successful learning contexts include time for students to reflect on the connections that they are making, the logical relationships that they are identifying, and whether they are successfully learning from the text.

The same instructional features that promote learning in general will also support successful learning from text. The text must be comprehensible and present significant content, however, and at least some of the instruction must focus on the ideas presented in the text. For fourth graders learning about electric circuits or twelfth graders learning about the judicial system, whether they learn from reading text will depend on the match among their goals for reading, the characteristics of the text, their reading strategies, and the entire instructional context within which their reading occurs.