ABSTRACT
Because this volume is a tribute to Walter Kintsch, I open this chapter with an anecdote. When I first became interested in the topic of comprehension monitoring, I was a fourth-year graduate student searching for a novel dissertation topic. I had already done some situation model work with mental maps (Weaver & Kintsch, 1987), and some preliminary work with algebra word problems (later published, with a tremendous amount of revision; Weaver & Kintsch, 1992). Neither of these captured my imagination, though. While skimming though journals one day, I happened upon the work of Glenberg and Epstein (1985), and decided that this was a puzzle worth exploring. It seemed to me so intuitively obvious that readers were able to monitor their reading, yet here was abundant evidence suggesting that they could not. I read everything I could on the topic, and finally approached Kintsch about it, as a possible topic: Why can’t readers better monitor their reading behavior? Did it have something to do with the level at which they were asking the questions? Could the Kintsch model be applied here?
