ABSTRACT
Educators and researchers have long suspected that approaching the comprehension of text with either general or specific questions in mind might facilitate understanding. The kinds of questions people asked and the places in the text they asked them seemed to us indicative of important comprehension processes. The primary task was one in which readers asked questions after reading each sentence in the story. In another task a different group of subjects read the same stories silently while we timed their reading. To better understand the results, a somewhat more detailed description of the four tasks is necessary: question asking, reading times, recall, and importance. There are two types of questions that occur: those that are asked by several subjects, and those that are idiosyncratic. The number of questions asked by subjects as they read through a story correlates with the amount of time spent on that sentence by other readers reading silently.
