Contributions of Student Questioning and Prior Knowledge to Construction of Knowledge From Reading Information Text

Journal of Literacy Research, 2006 by Taboada, Ana, Guthrie, John T

This study investigated the relationship of student-generated questions and prior knowledge with reading comprehension. A questioning hierarchy was developed to describe the extent to which student-generated questions seek different levels of conceptual understanding. Third- and fourth-grade students (N = 360) posed questions that were related to their prior knowledge and reading comprehension, measured as conceptual knowledge built from text. The results indicated that student questioning accounted for a significant amount of variance in students' reading comprehension, after accounting for the contribution of prior knowledge. Furthermore, low- and high-level questions were differentially associated with low and high levels of conceptual knowledge gained from text, showing a clear alignment between questioning levels and reading comprehension levels.

An active learner has been described as inquisitive and curious-someone who asks a substantial number of questions (Graesser, McMahen, & Johnson, 1994). Students who compose and answer their own questions are perceived as playing an active, initiating role in the learning process (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1990; King, 1994; Palincsar& Brown, 1984; Singer, 1978). They seek information that is related to an existing knowledge structure (Olson, Duffy, & Mack, 1985). Student questioning, defined as self-generated requests for information within a topic or domain, relies on assessing what is known and what is unknown about a topic and attempting to expand existing knowledge of the topic (Taboada & Guthrie, 2004).

In reading, student questioning is represented as a strategy that helps foster active comprehension (e.g., National Reading Panel, 2000; Singer, 1978). The significance of student questioning during reading was underscored in a call for the improvement of comprehension tests: "We might wish for more extended passages, more complex interpretive questions, and certainly, opportunities for students to formulate questions about what they read instead of just selecting answers to a test-maker's questions" (Resnick & Klopfer, 1989, pp. 208-209).

Student Questioning in Relation to Text

Instruction in generating questions in relation to both expository and narrative texts has been shown to positively influence reading comprehension for elementary school, middle school, high school, and college students (Ezell, Kohler, Jarzynka, & Strain, 1992; King & Rosenshine, 1993; Nolte & Singer, 1985; Raphael & Pearson, 1985; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1992; Singer & Donlan, 1982; Taylor & Frye, 1992). The instructional effect has been evident in students' accuracy in answering test questions, better free recall of text, and identification of main ideas (Rosenshine, Meister, & Chapman, 1996). However, a limitation of many of these studies is that the authors have not attempted to provide evidence that the processes of question asking were the source of improvement in comprehension, nor has a theoretical explanation for the effects of questioning instruction been provided. For example, it is possible that instruction on questioning increased students' activation of their background knowledge and that such activation accounted for the positive effects of the instruction. In other words, the attribution of the instructional effects to questioning has not been shown empirically, and a theoretical explanation of the benefits of questioning instruction has not been formulated in detail.

The evidence for questioning instruction in relation to narrative texts is extensive in terms of the types of questions students ask and the impact these questions have on different comprehension measures. For instance, third graders who learned to ask literal questions in relation to short stories showed significant gains in answering and generating questions in criterion and standardized reading comprehension tests as compared to students who did not learn to generate story-based questions (Cohen, 1983). Older students, who learned to ask story-specific questions by using elements of story structure (e.g., Who is the leading character?), also scored significantly higher on tests assessing knowledge of story structure as compared to students who answered teacher-posed questions (Nolte & Singer, 1985; Singer & Donlan, 1982). Furthermore, third-grade students have learned to formulate their own questions by distinguishing between the text to which the question referred and the knowledge base of the reader (Ezell et al., 1992). These students showed gains of 2.2 years (grade-equivalent score) on the California Achievement Test when compared to third graders who did not receive questioning instruction (Ezell et al., 1992). However, these results may be confounded by the fact that students who received questioning instruction had also been exposed to a rich, narrative reading curriculum with a large number of supplemental stories and were compared to students who did not have the same curriculum.

A meta-analysis of instructional studies (Rosenshine et al., 1996) revealed that the impact of questioning instruction yielded larger effect sizes for experimenter-based comprehension tests (effect size [ES] = .87) than for standardized tests (ES = .36). These effects were observed when students asked specific questions using, mainly, three types of question prompts: (a) signal words (e.g., who, where, how, why), (b) generic question stems (e.g., How are X and Y alike? How is X related to Y?) for expository texts, and (c) story grammar categories (e.g., a main character's goals) for narrative texts.