| This study examined the relationship between text difficulty, mode of text presentation, and inference-making, and was guided by the following questions: What inference-making processes do students engage in as a narrative text varies according to level of difficulty and presentation format? What types of inferences do students make and how frequently are they generated? The project involved 27 fourth and fifth graders from the San Francisco Bay Area whose comprehension was at the third grade instructional level. These students participated in two 3-part, one-on-one sessions. In the first session, students provided verbal reports of their thinking as they attempted to comprehend three different narrative texts at their instructional reading level. One text was presented in audio form, another text was presented in print form, and a third text was presented in video form. The text presentation format as well as the sequence of texts and presentation formats varied by student and were counterbalanced to assure that there were comparable numbers of students who experienced the same text-format match, sequence of texts, and sequence of presentation formats. In the second session, students repeated the process with three texts at two grade levels above their instructional reading level. Students' verbal protocols were segmented into lists of propositions that were categorized according to the types of cognitive processes they represented. Analyses focused on the types of inferences students made, and how frequently they were generated. While findings suggest that format effects on inference-making were significant and text level effects were not, a format by level interaction effect complicates these findings. Most notably, it appears that individual differences play an important role, especially since the influence of story, format, sequence, and story-format combinations was not significant. That is, determining which condition (print, audio, or video) was more helpful or problematic, overall, was an impossible task. For example, while some students appeared to have an easier time generating inferences within the audio context, others clearly struggled. Similarly, findings associated with recall-level data also resulted in an interaction effect that prompted a closer consideration of individual differences since there was no significant effect due to text level or presentation format. It is interesting to note that for some students print texts elicited more recall-level propositions with easier texts, while video texts prompted more recall with more challenging texts. |
