ABSTRACT
Research during the past decade has revealed a wide range of strategies used by adults and children to comprehend what they read. For example, researchers using think-aloud methods have demonstrated that adults and children who explain and elaborate what they are reading to themselves and who have a flexible approach to solving comprehension problems (i.e., use a variety of strategies) remember text and solve problems better than those who do not (e.g., Chi, deLeeuw, Chiu, & LaVancher, 1994; Goldman, Coté, & Saul, 1994; Goldman & Saul, 1990a; Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994; Trabasso & Magliano, 1996). In fact, Pressley and Afflerbach (1995) were able to compile an impressive catalog of the wide range of comprehension, monitoring, and evaluation processes that researchers have found in think-aloud protocols of reading, usually in studies of highly skilled adult readers. However, our knowledge of the range of activities that skilled readers may engage in does not yet allow us to understand exactly how readers, especially children, construct coherent representations online as they process text, or which activities are related to constructing different types of representations. This information is particularly lacking for expository text from which readers are to learn and acquire new information, that is, informational or instructional text (e.g., Goldman, 1996; Goldman, Varma, & Coté, 1996; Lorch, 1995).
