learning disability quarterly volume 3 issue 1 1980 [doi 10.2307%2f1510423] bernice y. l. wong --...

Hammill Institute on Disabilities

Activating the Inactive Learner: Use of Questions/Prompts to Enhance Comprehension andRetention of Implied Information in Learning Disabled ChildrenAuthor(s): Bernice Y. L. WongSource: Learning Disability Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Winter, 1980), pp. 29-37Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1510423 .Accessed: 14/06/2014 07:49

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ACTIVATING THE INACTIVE LEARNER: USE OF QUESTIONS/PROMPTS

TO ENHANCE COMPREHENSION AND RETENTION OF IMPLIED INFORMATION

IN LEARNING DISABLED CHILDREN

Bernice Y. L. Wong

Abstract. This article reports the findings of two studies involving comprehension and retention of implied Information in learning disabled and normally achieving second and sixth graders. In the first study, evidence was obtained of inadequate processing of implied information in learning disabled children in both grades. In the second study, a simple questions/prompts procedure brought about improved/adequate processing of implied information in new, comparable groups of learning disabled second and sixth graders. The results were interpreted to support Torgesen's conceptualization of the learning disabled child as an inactive learner. Lastly, educational implications of the results were discussed.

A number of studies of learning disabled children's memory functions have suggested that memory problems may play a significant role in their reading problems (Morrison, Giordani, & Nagy, 1977; Torgesen, 1977a; Waller, 1976; Wong, Wong, & Foth, 1977; Wong, 1978). The focus on memory problems, however, does not reflect advocacy of a single-factor theory of learning disabilities, suggesting that memory deficits alone cause the development of learning disabilities. Rather, it is implicitly assumed that learning disabled children's memory problems interact with other possible cognitive problems, e.g., language problems (cf. Vellutino, 1978), and/or interact with insufficiently individual- ized instructional programs to produce learning problems (Adelman, 1971). Moreover, the obtained information concerns only the particular subgroup of learning disabled children with memory problems. Such information would not help other subgroups of learning disabled children with different cognitive deficits, e.g., conceptual difficulties.

Torgesen (1977b) appears to have pro- vided a satisfactory conceptual framework for research on learning disabled children's memory functions. According to Torgesen's conceptualization, the learning disabled child is seen as an inactive learner who does not participate actively in his/her own learning. The inactive learner lacks a general awareness of his/her own cognitive processes and of the demands of a given task, and lacks goal-directed motivation. Torgesen thinks that the learning disabled child's general lack of cognitive awareness and lack of motivation result in an inability to adopt task-appropriate strategies. The use of appropriate strategies include rehearsing, label- ing, visual imagery, and sentence elaboration (Craik & Lockhart, 1972; Craik & Tulving, 1975; Meachem, 1972). Torgesen (1977b)

BERNICE Y. L. WONG, Ed.D., is Assistant Professor, Education Faculty, Simon Fraser University, B.C., Canada.

Volume 3, Winter 1980 29


suggests that in certain tasks, especially in memory tasks, learning disabled children's failure may be caused by their lack of appropriate strategies. He does not deny that the majority of learning disabled children may have attentional and/or memory problems. However, he emphasizes that a complete analysis of a learning disabled child's failure at any task should include consideration of the absence of appropriate strategies as well as cognitive deficits. Thus, within the context of Tor- gesen's (1977b) conception of the learning disabled child, the use of task-appropriate strategies assumes prominence. One strategy that appears important for children's comprehension and memory is the ability to derive inferences (Paris & Lindauer, 1976; Paris, Lindauer, & Cox, 1978). Truncated passive sentences, semantic entailment, and transi- tivity are understood by incorporating the appropriate inferences into semantically inte- grated memory representatives of those relationships. However, children also derive and retain inferred relationships from prose. It has been shown that children often infer pre- suppositions, consequences, means-ends rela- tions, and affective states of characters in brief stories read to them (Paris, 1975; Stein & Glenn, 1975). Moreover, the ability to understand and remember inferences in prose appears to improve with age for children from 6 to 12 years old, and may reflect more than age-related increase in memory capacity. Paris (1975) showed that there was a high correlation between a child's ability to understand implied relationships within a story and the long-term retention of the main ideas of the story. Thus, comprehension of implied relationships may be an important strategy for remembering semantic information.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the comprehension of implied information in learning disabled children. Based on Torgesen's (1977a) conception of learning disabled children as inactive learners, we predicted that learning disabled children would not use this strategy (comprehension of implied information) to encode given verbal stimuli as efficiently as children without learning problems. Specifically, given sentences with implied consequences (e.g., "My brother fell down on the playground" with the

implied consequence being "and skinned his knee"), the learning disabled child would not spontaneously generate the implicit consequences during encoding of the sentences. Consequently, in the subsequent recall of sentences with implied consequences, his/her recall would not be facilitated by the given retrieval cues (i.e., "playground - and skinned his knee"). Hence, we would pre- dict that learning disabled children would demonstrate poor recall of sentences with implied consequences.

EXPERIMENT I Method

Subjects. A total of 128 children partici- pated in the study. Half of them were second graders and the remaining half were sixth graders. Within each grade level, the children were evenly divided into two groups, one group consisting of learning disabled children, the other consisting of good readers.

The criteria for classifying a child as learning disabled were as follows: (1) S/he demonstrated an academic reading deficit of one year or more below grade level; (2) S/he had adequate intelligence as mea- sured on the Performance Scale of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-R, 1976); (3) S/he had no physical, sensory or emotional disorders. The learning disabled subjects had all previously been identified by school district personnel and were attending daily remedial classes for about an hour in Learning Assistance Centres.

The learning disabled children were randomly recruited from two large elementary schools in a suburban school district in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. The two schools were located in the same lower middle-class socioeconomic area. The good readers were randomly selected from the same classrooms as the learning disabled children. Within each group of children, the ratio of boys and girls was approximately equal.

The mean Performance I.Q. of the grade two learning disabled children was 98.9 (S.D. = 11.96). The mean Performance I.Q. of the grade two good readers was 101.15 (S.D. = 9.63). The mean reading level of the grade two learning disabled children was 1.0 grade below grade level (S.D. = .13) on the Gates McGinitie Reading

30 Learning Disability Quarterly


Tests. The mean reading level of the grade two good readers was 1.54 grades above grade level (S.D. = .30).

The mean Performance I.Q. of the grade six learning disabled children and good readers was 100.75 (S.D. = 13.61) and 103.90 (S.D. = 7.24), respectively. The mean reading levels were: 1.83 grades below grade level for the grade six learning disabled children (S.D. = .39) and 1.28 grades above grade level for the grade six good readers (S.D. = .66).

The school districts of Vancouver, British Columbia, now have a strict policy on admin- istering intelligence tests to students. Because of negative sentiment to the possibility of stigmatization of normally achieving students resulting from classifying them according to intelligence, school board officials are ex- tremely reluctant to grant permission to administer intelligence tests. They are also under pressure from school trustees who are generally rather vehement against intelligence testing. Moreover, school board officials are concerned with reactions from parents even though their consent for such testing is man- datory. The present author managed to per- suade the school district involved to administer intelligence tests to the subjects by pointing out the importance of ensuring that (a) the learning disabled students are not mentally retarded, and (b) the results have to be clear of confounds from differential intelligence levels between the normally achieving and learning disabled subjects. However, the school board officials insisted that a child was not removed from his/her classroom for more than 20-25 minutes. To meet that requirement four items from the Per- formance Tests of the WISC-R (1970) were chosen. These items included: Picture Com- pletion, Picture Arrangement, Block Design, and Object Assembly. Because learning disabled children tend to perform poorer on the Verbal Tests of the WISC (Hallahan, 1975; Bryan, 1978), the Performance Tests were chosen as a more valid base of comparison between them and their normally achieving peers.

Materials The following set of sentences was gener-

ated to allow a plausible consequence of

action which could be implicitly and explicitly stated. Cues were comprised of an explicitly stated noun (underlined, e.g., "playground") and the consequence (enclosed in parentheses, e.g., "skinned his knee"). These sentences were slightly modified versions of those used by Paris, Lindauer and Cox (1977). A. He ate a huge pizza (and his stomach

ached). 1. My brother fell down on the play-

ground (and skinned his knee). 2. The teacher turned out the lights for

the movie (and the room got dark). 3. Her pants were too tight when she

bent over (so they ripped). 4. He accidentally played in poison ivy

(and itched). 5. Mary dropped the glass of juice (and

broke it). 6. She slammed the door shut on her

hand (and hurt her fingers). 7. John sat on the balloon (and it made

a loud noise). 8. The kitten tipped over the dish (and

spilled the milk). B. She told a great joke (and everyone

laughed). Two lists of sentences were generated from

these materials and were given to different groups of subjects. The Explicit Sentence list consisted of the above sentences with the consequences (in parentheses) stated explicitly. The Implicit Sentence list omitted the consequence clauses and only implied the outcome. The retrieval cues for each sentence were identical for both Explicit and Implicit Sentence lists and for all subjects. Cues were comprised of an explicitly stated noun (underlined) and the consequence (enclosed in parentheses). Noun cues were always explicitly given but consequence cues referred to implied outcomes in the Implicit Sentence condition and overtly stated events in the Explicit list. The noun cues were chosen without regard to sentence constituency since previous research indicated no differences among subjects, verbs, and objects as explicit cues (Paris & Lindauer, 1976).

Sentences (A) and (B) were used to con- trol for primacy and recency effects in recall. Hence, the results on these two sentences were not scored.



Experimental Design The experimental design was a 2 (Grades)

x 2 (Good vs. Learning Disabled Readers) x 2 (Sentences: Explicit vs. Implicit) x 2 (Order: Word or Phrase first as retrieval cues) factorial, involving eight independent groups.

Procedure Four groups of 16 subjects each received

the Explicit Sentence list. These groups consisted of: (a) second-grade learning disabled children; (b) second-grade good readers; (c) sixth-grade learning disabled children, and (d) sixth-grade good readers. Four additional groups of 16 subjects each received the Implicit Sentence list. The composition of the groups was the same as in the Explicit Sentence list condition.

All subjects were seen individually and were informed that the purpose of the experimental task was to determine how many sentences people could remember. The eight experimental sentences plus the two filler sentences at the beginning and end of each list were read to subjects who then repeated them aloud. The presentation order of the eight sentences was randomized for each subject. The cued recall test followed a four-minute interpolated activity in which the subject had to circle designated numbers on sheets of random numbers.

During recall, each subject was given both the noun and consequence cues for each sentence. These 16 cues were balanced for order of presentation so that the explicit noun was the first cue for half of the sentences and the consequence was the first cue for the other half of the list for each subject. The sentences were balanced across subjects so that each sentence received the two cues in first and second order with the same frequency. The order of sentences in recall was the same for all subjects.

Prior to their recall of the sentences, the subjects were told that cues would be given that would be related to each of the sentences, but that the cue might or might not have been part of the sentence. They were also instructed that the sentences could be recalled more than once, with the maxi- mal number of recalls being three. For any subject who had two or three recalls on

a particular sentence, s/he was always scored on the last recall.

Scoring. For each sentence, the subject received one point if s/he correctly recalled two out of three items in the sequence of the subject-verb-predicate. This scoring procedure was modeled after the one re- ported by Paris and Lindauer (1976) and Paris, Lindauer, and Cox (1978). Two graduate students carried out scoring indepen- dently. Disagreement occurred in very few cases. Such disagreement was quickly re- solved in a discussion.

RESULTS The results were analyzed by a 2 (Groups)

x 2 (Grades) x 2 (Sentence Type) x 2 (Cues) repeated measures of variance. The results indicated that all main effects were significant. Thus, good readers recalled significantly more sentences than learning disabled readers [F(1,112) = 18.20, p

TABLE I Percentage of Correctly Recalled Sentences

in Good and Learning Disabled Children

Explicit Sentences Implicit Sentences Nouns Consequences Nouns Consequences

Good Readers Grade 2 70.63 62.63 54.88 33.13 Grade 6 79.88 70.38 70.72 56.50

Learning Disabled Readers Grade 2 70.50 58.00 37.75 19.00 Grade 6 73.63 67.50 50.13 29.75

obtained. Good readers recalled significantly more sentences with implied consequence cues than learning disabled readers [t.0, (one- tailed) = 4.95, p

EXPERIMENT II Their good recall of sentences with explicitly

stated consequences indicated that learning disabled children in grades two and six were capable of recalling the consequences in sentences. They did, however, recall significantly fewer sentences with implied consequences. Their failure to use indirect cues to access or retrieve what they knew indicates a lack of constructive processing and inferential strategies in their initial encoding of the sentences. Experiment II was designed to activate the cognitively inactive learning disabled children to generate constructive inferential processing in encoding by means of a questioning technique. If the learning disabled child's poor recall of sentences with implied consequences reflects "production deficiency" (Flavell, 1977, 1970), the questioning technique would induce him/her to use constructive operations and inferential strategies. We predicted, therefore, that this simple manipulation would enhance learning disabled children's comprehension and retention of implied consequences.

METHOD Because of our interest in the effects of

questions/prompts on learning disabled children's comprehension and retention of implied information, it was decided to use only learning disabled subjects. Our rationale was that the use of normally achieving children as additional controls would provide information peripheral to our interest. Moreover, the information would be redundant since they generally have higher recall levels than learning disabled children (Wong, 1978). In discussing research issues in learning disabilities, Senf (1976) has urged researchers to use designs involving entirely learning disabled subjects for similar reasons. Subjects

Sixteen grade two learning disabled children and 16 grade six learning disabled children were randomly drawn from two schools different from the ones involved in Experiment I. However, they were from the same school district and were located in the same kind of socioeconomic area as those in Experiment I. The school also sub- scribed to the same criteria of classifying and assessing learning disabilities stated previously.

The mean Performance I.Q. on the Wechs- ler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-R, 1976) of the grade two learning disabled children was 99.40 (S.D. = 13.23). Their mean reading performance on the Gates McGinitie Reading Tests was 1.1 below grade level (S.D. = .02). The mean Per- formance I.Q. of the grade six learning disabled children was 102.55 (S.D. = 12.01). Their mean reading performance on the Gates McGinitie Reading Tests was 1.78 grades below grade level (S.D. = 0.42).

Procedure The experimenter read each sentence to

the subject, excluding the implied consequence (i.e., the words in parenthesis). The subject repeated it aloud. The experimenter then asked the subject: "What do you think happens after?" (for example, "My brother fell down on the playground.") If the subject answered "Gets hurt," the experimenter continued with "Tell me more. In what way would 'my brother' get hurt?" The subject's answer did not need to con- form absolutely to the contents of the implied consequence. To be acceptable, his/her answer, however, had to involve mention of the part of the body which got hurt OR how it got hurt; for example, "leg", "scraped" for the sentence "My brother fell down on the playground." The questioning stopped when the subject's response satisfied criterion. S/he was given no feedback, however, on the correctness of the response. The experimenter's questions were consis- tently: "What do you think happens after (the stated event) in the sentence?" and "Tell me more." The questioning technique was systematically used on all the sentences for subjects in this treatment condition.

The subjects were given the same inter- polating activity as in Experiment I prior to the cued recall. Moreover, the instruc- tions for cued recall and the procedure for subsequent scoring of data were the same as in Experiment I.

The same two graduate students who scored the data in Experiment I also scored the data here. They disagreed over only two cases. Their disagreement was quickly re- solved in a brief discussion.



Data Analyses Because the learning disabled second and

sixth graders in the Implicit Sentence Condi- tion in Experiment I had not been given questions/prompts, they served as ready controls for the subjects in this experiment. Hence, their data were pooled with the present data to provide data for statistical analysis in a complete factorial.

The experimental design used in the data analysis was a 2 (Grades: Grade 2 vs. Grade 6) x 2 (Questions/Prompts: Presence vs. Absence) factorial. There were a total of 64 learning disabled children with 16 subjects per cell.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION The results indicated a significant main

effect of questions/prompts [F(1,60) = 49.42, p

make inferences about what s/he reads as actively as the good reader. Consequently, s/he may be suitably described as showing "production deficiency" in his/her poor task performance. More importantly, however, the present results indicated that s/he can be "activated" to generate needed processing strategies for successful performance at a given specific task.

GENERAL DISCUSSION The pith of the findings here is that

learning disabled children do not automatically generate constructive operations and inferential processing strategies in encoding of sentences with implied information. This is not to suggest that they lack the cognitive abilities for constructive and inferential processing. The results of Experiment II showed that they have the cognitive abilities. However, they demonstrated such abilities only under certain conditions. Specifically, given structured questions/prompts, learning disabled children demonstrated constructive inferential processing. Their subsequent recall level matched that of the good readers.

The learning disabled children's initially poor performance basically reflects a "production deficiency" (Flavell, 1977, 1970). Because they are "inactive learners" who do not customarily assume responsibilities for their own learning (cf. Torgesen, 1977b), it is understandable that they would not automatically engage in constructive operations.

We are, however, left with a searching question. Why do learning disabled children perpetually need to be cued to generate cognitive strategies necessary for successful performance at a particular task? It is important to note that they required structured (as in Experiment II) and directive cues (cf. Wong, 1978). A possible answer may come from the concept of "learned helplessness" (Seligman, 1975). Cumulative frus- trations from years of academic failure have eroded learning disabled children's motivation to learn and to sustain efforts at learning (Senf, 1976). Consequently, they may have lost all initiative at learning academic skills and rely increasingly on the teacher for generating (devising) strategies to help them to learn and to remember difficult materials (e.g., b/d discriminations). The

learning disabled children's dependent atti- tudes in learning may have generalized to other tasks resembling academic tasks. Al- though the concept of "learned helplessness" appears a feasible explanation for the question posed, empirical research on it is obviously needed. Future research on this issue appears warranted.

Finally, at the practical level, our results suggest that Learning Assistance teachers may use similar questions/prompts proce- dures to increase learning disabled students' inferential processing of reading materials. In particular, adapted versions of the questions/ prompts procedure here could be used to help learning disabled students successfully tackle difficult inferential questions. It is recalled that our questions/prompts procedure was very simple, consisting of two questions. In view of this, the obtained effects are rather striking.

REFERENCES Adelman, H.S. Learning problems: Part I. An

interactional view of causality. Academic Ther- apy, 1970-71, 6, 117-123.

Brown, A.L., & DeLoache, J.S. Skills, plans and self-regulation. In R. Siegler (Ed.), Carnegie- Mellon symposium on cognition. Hillside, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1977.

Craik, F.I.M., & Lockhart, R.S. Levels of processing: A framework for memory research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Be- havior, 1972, 11, 671-684.

Craik, F.I.M., & Tulving, E. Depth of processing and the retention of words in episodic memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 1975, 104, 268-294.

Flavell, J.H. Memory. In J.H. Flavell (Ed.), Cognitive development. Hillsdale, NJ: Law- rence Erlbaum Associates, 1977, 183-218.

Flavell, J.H. Developmental studies of mediated memory. In H.W. Reese & L.P. Lipsitt (Eds.), Advances in child development and behavior (Vol. 5). New York: Academic Press, 1970, 181-211.

Meachem, J. The development of memory abilities in the individual and society. Human Develop- ment, 1972, 15, 205-228.

Morrison, F.J., Giordani, B., & Nagy, I. Reading disability: An information-processing analysis. Science, 1977, 196, 77-79.

Paris, S.G. Integration and inference in children's comprehension and memory. In F. Restle, R. Shiffrin, J. Castellan, H. Lindman, & D. Pisoni (Eds.), Cognitive theory (Vol. 1). New Jersey:



Erlbaum and Associates, 1975. Paris, S.G., & Lindauer, B.K. The role of inference

in children's comprehension and memory for sentences. Cognitive Psychology, 1976, 8, 217, 227.

Senf, G.M. Future research needs in learning disabilities. In R.P. Anderson & C.G. Halcomb (Eds.), Learning-disabilities/minimal brain dys- function syndrome: Research perspectives and application. Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1976, 249-267.

Seligman, M.E. Helplessness. San Francisco, CA: Freeman and Co., 1975.

Stein, N.L., & Glenn, C.G. A developmental study of children's recall of story material. Paper presented at the Society for Research in Child Development, Denver, 1975.

Torgesen, J.K. Memorization processes in reading disabled children. Journal of Educational Psy- chology, 1977, 69, 571-578. (a)

Torgesen, J.K. The role of nonspecific factors in the task performance of learning disabled children: A theoretical assessment. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 1977, 10, 27-34. (b)

Waller, G.T. Children's recognition memory for written sentences: A comparison of good and poor readers. Child Development, 1976, 47, 90-95.

Wong, B., Wong, R., & Foth, D. Recalling and clustering of verbal materials among normal and poor readers. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 1977, 10, 375-378.

Wong, B. The effects of directive cues on the organization of memory and recall in good and poor readers. Journal of Educational Research, 1978, 72, 32-38.

Vellutino, F.R. Alternative conceptualizations of dyslexia: Evidence in support of a verbal- deficit hypothesis. Harvard Educational Review, 1977, 47, 334-354.



Article Contentsp. 29p. 30p. 31p. 32p. 33p. 34p. 35p. 36p. 37

Issue Table of ContentsLearning Disability Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Winter, 1980), pp. 1-104Front Matter [pp. 1 - 28]Learning Disabled Children's Attributions for Success and Failure [pp. 3 - 9]Intra-Individual Discrepancy in Diagnosing Specific Learning Disabilities [pp. 10 - 18]Stimulant Medications and the Classroom Attention-to-Task and Deviant Social Behaviors of Twelve Hyperactive Males [pp. 19 - 27]Activating the Inactive Learner: Use of Questions/Prompts to Enhance Comprehension and Retention of Implied Information in Learning Disabled Children [pp. 29 - 37]Predicting First-Grade Reading Achievement [pp. 38 - 48]Resource Room Support Services for Regular Teachers [pp. 49 - 53]The Relationship among Correct and Error Oral Reading Rates and Comprehension [pp. 54 - 64]Learning Disabled Boys' Nonverbal Behaviors within a Dyadic Interview [pp. 65 - 72]The Four Ws of Current Testing Practices: Who; What; Why; And to Whom: An Exploratory Survey [pp. 73 - 83]Discrepancy and Severity in the Learning Disabled: A Consolidated Perspective [pp. 84 - 90]Career Education for the Learning Disabled: Where Are We Now? [pp. 91 - 101]Back Matter [pp. 102 - 104]

learning disability quarterly volume 3 issue 1 1980 [doi 10.2307%2f1510423] bernice y. l. wong --...

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