Copyright 2001 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.
0022-0663/01/S5.00 DOI: 10.1037//0022-0663.93.3.521
Journal of Educational Psychology
2001, Vol. 93, No. 3, 521-529
Inferential Questioning: Effects on Comprehension of Narrative Texts as a
Function of Grade and Timing
Paul van den Broek
Yuhtsuen Tzeng
University of Minnesota
National Chung Cheng University
Kirsten Risden
Tom Trabasso
Microsoft Corporation
University of Chicago
Patricia Basche
School District of Durand, Wisconsin
In this study, we investigated the effects of inferential questioning, and of the timing of such questioning,
on narrative comprehension by 4th-, 7th-, and lOth-grade students and college students. Students received
questions either during or after reading simple narrative texts. Control groups read the texts without
questions. Questioning, particularly during reading, interfered with the youngest students' recall both of
text information in general and of information specifically targeted by the questions. Questioning
facilitated college students' memory but only for information specifically targeted by the questions and
only when questioning occurred during reading. As reading and language skills become more proficient
and automatic, inferential questioning increasingly directs readers' attention during reading to the
information targeted by the questions. In addition, inferential questioning challenges the processing
capacities of younger or less skilled readers and, hence, may interfere with comprehension.
affects the outcome of reading, and so on—is essential for its
systematic use as an instructional tool.
To understand how questions influence comprehension, it is
important to place them within a theoretical view of comprehension itself. Most theories view comprehension as the identification
and encoding of parts of a text and of the relations between them
to form a coherent structure in memory, a mental representation
that can be accessed for use at a later time (e.g., Graesser & Clark,
1985; Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978; Trabasso, Secco, & van den
Broek, 1984; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). Various types of relations
exist, but in narrative and many other text genres, causal relations
have been found to play a particularly central role in structuring
the mental representations (O'Brien & Myers, 1987; Trabasso et
al., 1984; Trabasso, van den Broek, & Suh, 1989). Indeed, narrative representations may be best described as causal networks.
Readers of a wide range of ages and abilities construct these
networks by inferring connections between causal antecedents and
consequences (e.g., Bloom, Fletcher, van den Broek, Reitz, &
Shapiro, 1990; Casteel, 1993; Goldman & Vamhagen, 1986;
Graesser & Clark, 1985; Horiba, 1990; Horiba, van den Broek, &
Fletcher, 1993; O'Brien & Myers, 1987; van den Broek, 1994;
Wolman, 1991; Wolman, van den Broek, & Lorch, 1997). Further,
text revisions aimed at facilitating the identification of causal
relations improve comprehension and memory, particularly for
weaker readers (Linderholm, Gaddy, & van den Broek, 2000). In
general, the pattern observed in these and other studies is clear:
The greater the number of causal relations that readers identify in
a text, the more coherent they perceive the text to be, and the better
they remember it.
Teachers use questions routinely not only to assess but also to
promote reading comprehension. In this paper, we investigate how,
why, and under what circumstances questions benefit comprehension. Traditionally, the aim of educational-psychological research
on the use of questioning has been to argue for or test the effectiveness of a specific type of question and to propose how to
instruct students in answering them (Nix, 1985; Raphael & Pearson, 1985). In recent years, attention has shifted toward the identification of the cognitive correlates associated with the effects of
questioning on comprehension (e.g., Graesser, McMahen, & Johnson, 1994; Pressley & McCormick, 1996). This shift reflects a
recognition that an understanding of the cognitive operations underlying the use of questioning—how questioning influences the
actual comprehension processes during reading, in what manner it
Paul van den Broek, Department of Educational Psychology, University
of Minnesota; Yuhtsuen Tzeng, Center of Teacher Education, National
Chung Cheng University, Chia-Yi, Taiwan; Kirsten Risden, Learning
Business Unit, Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Washington; Tom Trabasso, Department of Psychology, University of Chicago; Patricia Basche,
Pupil Services Department, School District of Durand, Durand, Wisconsin.
This research was supported by the Center for Cognitive Sciences at the
University of Minnesota through National Institute of Child Health and
Human Development Grant #HD-07151, the Guy Bond Endowment for
Reading and Literacy, and a Golestan fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Paul van
den Broek, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Minnesota, 178 Pillsbury Drive SE, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455. Electronic
mail may be sent to [email protected].
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VAN DEN BROEK, TZENG, RISDEN, TRABASSO, AND BASCHE
Thus, questions may benefit narrative comprehension to the
extent that they support the construction of a causal network
representation. They may provide such support in at least two
possible ways. One possibility is that questioning increases the
overall amount of attention that readers direct toward comprehension or raises their criteria for comprehension (e.g., Hacker, 1998;
van den Broek, Risden, & Husebye-Hartman, 1995), resulting in
better understanding of the text as a whole. Indeed, this is often the
motivation for employing questioning techniques in the classroom.
From this general-attention perspective, questioning results in the
construction of greater numbers of relational connections throughout the text. Readers are motivated to give good answers and thus
put more effort into understanding the text as a whole. As a result,
the effects of questioning are not limited to the information targeted by the questions and the answers generated in response to
them but extend to the entire text. Comprehension and memory for
all parts of the text will improve.
A second possibility is that questioning prompts readers to infer
relations between queried and answered information, resulting in
differential encoding of these particular pieces of information and
their connections (Olson, Duffy, & Mack, 1985; Pressley, McDaniel, Turnure, Wood, & Ahmad, 1987). From this perspective,
questioning benefits comprehension by encouraging readers to
make specific relational connections explicit. According to this
specific-attention perspective, the effects of questioning are concentrated in the information contained in the questions and answers and in the connections between them. Thus, enhancement of
readers' comprehension and memory will only appear for the parts
of texts that are targeted by questions.' Support for the specificattention account comes from studies that have shown that questioning increases the understanding of specific intratext relations.
Sixth-grade students trained on question-answering techniques
demonstrated enhanced recognition of relations between parts of a
text targeted by the questions (Raphael & Pearson, 1985). Furthermore, posing comprehension questions increased very young children's recall, but only for the specific parts of a story episode that
the participants were asked to integrate (Cassidy & DeLoache,
1995; Liu, 1985).
Under both possibilities, the benefits of questioning are thought
to occur because the procedure increases or alters the attention that
readers allocate to the various parts of the text during reading. This
view is in line with recent models of text comprehension, which
describe the processes involved in the construction of mental
representations of texts (e.g., Britton & Graesser, 1996; Goldman,
Varma, & Cote, 1996; Kintsch, 1988; van den Broek, Young,
Tzeng, & Linderholm, 1999; van Oostendorp & Goldman, 1999).
According to these models, only if two segments of information
(from text or background knowledge) are attended to simultaneously can a semantic relation between them be inferred (van den
Broek et al., 1999). Thus, efficient recruitment and allocation of
attention are essential for successful reading.
The effectiveness of questioning may vary as a function of the
timing of the questions, however. Questions posed during reading
may have different effects than those posed after reading. Questions posed during comprehension may serve to support the on-line
inferential processes that allow readers to connect parts of a text
(Olson et al., 1985). As readers proceed through the text, their
attention constantly shifts as a function of the text segment that
currently is being read and as a function of their comprehension
processes (van den Broek et al., 1999). Questions during reading
directly influence this shifting pattern of activation and, hence, one
would expect them to influence inference making profoundly. In
contrast, questions posed after reading may be of less benefit
because readers already have constructed their representation, and
established representations tend to be less amenable to modification (Robertson, Black, & Lehnert, 1985; van Oostendorp & Goldman, 1999). If questioning after reading has an influence at all, it
may be restricted to prompting readers to recognize connections
that were not identified during initial reading. Thus, any benefits
are likely to be limited to the information contained in the questions, the answers, and the connections between the two, as in the
specific attention-during-reading scenario.
The described pattern of timing effects may occur for readers
with relatively fluent and efficient comprehension skills: readers
who are able to reconcile the additional demands of the questioning task with those of their spontaneous comprehension processes
and, as a result, produce a highly coherent memory representation.
Not all readers function at this level, however, and it is important
to consider how the effects of question timing may vary as a
function of reader characteristics. Younger readers, for example,
generally are less able to construct richly interconnected and
highly cohesive representations than are older readers. There are at
least two reasons for this. First, younger readers' basic reading
skills (i.e., decoding, lexical access, etc.) tend to be less automated
than those of older readers (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974). Thus,
lower-level processing competes with and draws attentional resources from higher-level processes such as inference generation
(Carpenter, Miyake, & Just, 1994; Oakhill & Yuill, 1996). Second,
although younger readers readily detect relations among characters' goals, actions, and the outcomes of the actions, they have
difficulty detecting relations between superordinate and subordinate goals (Goldman & Varahagen, 1986; Trabasso & Suh, 1993;
van den Broek, 1988, 1997) as well as identifying themes (Williams, 1993). Thus, younger readers are less sensitive to the global
relations commonly found in narratives. In contrast, such relations
are inferred routinely by adult readers (e.g., Long, Golding, &
Graesser, 1992). Together, factors such as a relative lack of automaticity in basic reading skills and a relative lack of sensitivity to
global relations limit the interconnectivity and cohesiveness of the
story representations that young readers construct.
The differences between comprehension processes in older and
younger readers raise the possibility that the effect of question
timing on comprehension may depend on the reader's age. For
young readers, the additional demands associated with questioning
during reading may actually interfere with comprehension. Understanding a question, initiating a search for relevant information,
and formulating a response may compete with the child's spontaneous comprehension processes for limited working-memory resources and may severely impair inference generation of any kind.
Indeed, questioning has been found to reduce text memory by
young (5-7 years of age) children (e.g., Miller & Pressley, 1989).
In contrast, older readers' lower-level processing may be sufficiently automatic and, hence, they may have enough attentional
1
In this account, the effect of questions during reading would be similar
to the well-documented selective-orientation effect of "preadjunct" questions (e.g., Smith, 1996).
523
QUESTIONING EFFECTS ON NARRATIVE COMPREHENSION
resources available to handle the adjunct questions. As a result, for
these readers, questioning during reading may support and extend
normal inferential processes, resulting in positive effects on
comprehension.
When placed within this theoretical framework, it becomes clear
that the effects of questioning on comprehension may be complex
and subtle. Understanding how and under what circumstances
questioning benefits or interferes with comprehension is a crucial
step toward designing instructional methods for improving students' understanding of what they read. These are the issues we
address in the present study. Specifically, the goals of the study
are, first, to investigate how the timing of inferential questions
influences their effectiveness; second, to explore whether the influence of question timing depends on the grade level of the
reader; and third, to determine whether the effects of questioning
lie in a general increase in attention to the entire text or in
privileged encoding of those text elements—and their relations—
contained in the questions and answers. To attain these goals,
questions targeting causal relations were derived for two stories.
Readers from a broad age range—from 4th grade to college—
answered the questions either during or after reading. A control
group at each age received no questions. We assessed recall for the
text as a whole and for specific information to determine whether
questioning influenced comprehension and whether any such effects were general or specific to the information targeted by the
questions.
Booklets containing instructions, stories, questions, a delay task consisting of multidigit addition arithmetic problems (e.g., 138 + 257 = ?), and
a recall form were constructed. Three different versions of each booklet
were constructed according to the three question-timing conditions: during
reading, after reading, and control. For the during-reading condition, questions were presented within the text, immediately after the relevant text
segment (see Appendix). For the after-reading condition, questions were
presented after the story but before recall. The order of the questions was
the same in these two conditions. Finally, in the control condition, no
questions were asked before story recall. Question and recall sheets were
on separate pages to prevent participants from looking back at the text
when generating their responses. Thus, this procedure assessed readers'
comprehension and memory for the texts rather than their ability to locate
answers in a text (cf. Goldman & Saul, 1990). The arithmetic sheets were
placed just before the recall form in all conditions. The purpose of the
arithmetic task was to keep the time interval between reading and recalling
the stories constant across conditions. The order of the experimental stories
was counterbalanced within and across conditions.
Procedure
Each participant received a booklet with one of the question-timing
versions. After reading the instructions and completing the practice story as
a group, participants progressed through the booklets at their own pace
according to the instructions. The order of tasks was identical for each
participant (text reading, delay task, recall), except for the presence and
location of questions (during reading, after reading, or none). Participants
wrote their responses to the questions and their recall of the story in their
own words in space provided in the booklets.
Method
Participants
Two hundred forty students participated in this study. Sixty 4th-grade
students (mean age = 10.2 years), 60 7th-grade students (mean age =13.6
years), and 60 lOth-grade students (mean age = 16.3 years) were recruited
from public schools in the upper Midwest. Sixty undergraduate college
students were recruited from the University of Minnesota and received
extra credit in introductory psychology courses in exchange for participation. Twenty participants from each of the grade levels participated in the
during-reading questioning, after-reading questioning, and control conditions, respectively.
Materials
Three hierarchically structured stories were adapted from Liu (1985) for
use in this study. Each story centered on the main character's efforts to
attain a superordinate goal through the accomplishment of subgoals. One
story, about a girl who wanted to buy a birthday present, was eight
sentences in length and served as a practice story. The experimental stories
were 26 (Igor) and 30 (Brian) sentences long. The Igor story was about a
baker who wanted to create a special cake; the Brian story was about a boy
who wanted to be chosen for a school show. Both stories were appropriate
for a 3rd-grade reading level according to Fry's (1968, 1975) readability
index. The experimental stories are provided in the Appendix.
The Igor and Brian stories were parsed into causal-network diagrams,
and questions probing relations that were structurally important to the
representation of the stories were identified according to the procedures
outlined by Liu (1985) and Trabasso et al. (1989). Fourteen questions were
constructed for each text (three for the practice story): five questions that
probed why the character performed an action, six questions that probed
what he did to attain the goal, and three questions that probed how he
attained a successful outcome. The Appendix contains the questions. The
answers to all questions could be found in the story text.
Results
Scoring
Story statements and recall protocols were submitted to a prepositional analysis according to procedures described by Turner and
Green (1978) and Kintsch and van Dijk (1978). A participant
received credit for having recalled a story proposition if the proposition's general meaning was retained in a corresponding proposition in the participant's protocol. Thus, recall was scored according to a gist criterion. Two independent coders completed both
propositional analysis and scoring. In each case, agreement was
high (92% for the propositional analysis; K = .81, p < .01, for
recall scoring). Disagreements between coders were resolved
through discussion.
General Analysis
A first analysis was conducted to determine the overall effect of
questioning on comprehension. A 3 X 4 (question timing by grade)
factorial analysis of variance was performed on the proportion of
story statements recalled. There was a significant main effect for
grade, F(3, 708) = 67.71,/? < .0001. College students recalled the
largest proportion of the texts (.57), followed by the lOth-grade
(.50), 7th-grade (.42), and 4th-grade (.25) students. The difference
between college and lOth-grade students was not significant,
r(716) = 1.05, p > .10. The lOth-grade students recalled more than
did the 7th-grade students, r(716) = 2.03, p < .05, and 7th-grade
students recalled marginally more than did 4th-grade students,
;(716) = 1.88, p = .06. Thus, a normal developmental trend was
observed. There also was a main effect of questioning timing, F(2,
708) = 13.08, p < .0001. Readers recalled the same amount of
524
VAN DEN BROEK, TZENG, RISDEN, TRABASSO, AND BASCHE
DDuring Reading 0After Reading •Control
Fourth
Seventh
Tenth
College
Grade
Figure I. Mean proportion of story statements recalled as a function of
grade and questioning timing.
information in the during-reading questioning as in the control
condition, /(472) = 1.82, p > ,05,2 but they recalled less in the
after-reading questioning condition, f(478) = 4.51, p < .001 and
?(474) = 2.45, p < .05, compared with the control and duringreading conditions, respectively.
The main effects of grade and questioning timing were qualified
by a significant interaction, F(6, 708) = 12.58, p < .001. We first
explored this interaction by considering timing effects within each
grade level. As depicted in Figure 1, college students' recall
differed across questioning-timing conditions. They benefited
from during-reading questioning, t( 177) = 2.56, p < .05, but not
from after-reading questioning, f(177) < 1, in comparison to the
control condition. Their performance in the questioning-duringreading condition was significantly higher than that in the
questioning-after-reading condition, /(177) = 2,56, p < .05.
Tenth-grade students' recall also differed across questioningtiming conditions. Their recall declined under both during-reading
and after-reading questioning, /(117) = 2.65, p < .01 and
/(118) = 2.10, /) < .05, respectively, compared within the control
condition. Performance did not differ between the two questioning
conditions, r(177) < 1. Seventh-grade students" recall in the
during-reading condition did not differ from that in the control
condition, t( 118) < 1, but their recall in the after-reading condition
was significantly lower than in both control and during-reading
conditions, ?(106) = 6.59, p < .001 and f(177) = 7.10,p < .001,
respectively. Finally, 4th-grade students' recall was severely impaired both in the during-reading and after-reading questioning
conditions, ?(103) = 5.98, p < .001 and f(115) = 3.12, p < .01,
respectively, when compared with recall in the control condition.
The impairment in the during-reading condition was stronger than
that in the after-reading condition, f(177) = 5.99, p < .001. 3
Another way to explore the interaction between grade and
questioning timing is to consider possible grade differences within
each questioning-timing condition. For during-reading questioning, 4th-grade students recalled less than did 7th-grade students,
f(103) = 10.49, p < .01. Recall by 7th-grade students did not
differ from that of lOth-grade students, t(l 17) = 1.84, p > .05, but
both groups recalled less than did the college students,
?(118) = 2.32 and ?(117) = 4.29, ps < .01, respectively. For
after-reading questioning, 4th- and 7th-grade students did not
differ in the amount they recalled, r( 114) < 1, but both grades
recalled less than did lOth-grade and college students,
?(116) = 5.97, r(107) = 6.19, r(113) = 7.67, and /(102) = 7.98,
ps < .01, respectively. Tenth-grade students marginally recalled
less than did college students, /(117) = 1.89, p = .06. In the
control condition, 4th-grade students recalled less than did 7thgrade, lOth-grade, and college students, f( 118) = 2.86, 4.55,
and 3.46 respectively, ps < .01. Recall for 7th-grade, lOth-grade,
and college students did not differ, f(l 18) ranging from 1.70 to .60,
ps > .05.4
In summary, improvement in overall recall was observed only in
one situation, when college readers received questions during
reading. For readers in the grade levels, questioning—during as
well as after reading—resulted in a decline in overall recall of the
text (with the exception of the 7th-grade readers, for whom questioning during reading had neither beneficial nor detrimental effects). The negative effects of questioning were strongest for the
youngest readers, especially when they received the questions
during reading. Within each questioning condition, a developmental trend was observed, with each consecutively older group generally remembering more than their younger counterparts (although adjacent groups occasionally did not differ significantly).
This was not the case, however, for the control condition. Here, the
oldest three groups did not differ in the amount they recalled.
Locus-of-Questioning Effects
Both facilitative and inhibitory effects of questioning on readers' comprehension were observed in the first analyses. The purpose of a second set of analyses was to determine whether questioning affects comprehension of the text as a whole (i.e., the
general-attention hypothesis) or whether it affects comprehension
of the specific parts of the text targeted by the questions and
answers (i.e., the specific-attention hypothesis). If, in accordance
with the general-attention hypothesis, questioning leads to greater
overall attention to the text, two possible recall patterns may occur.
The most obvious possibility is that readers recall more of all
information in the text because the increased attention helps create
stronger memory traces for all story elements. A second possibility
is that less important information is recalled better than when no
2
Separate variances were used for each contrast in these and subsequent
analyses because in each case, Levene's test of homogeneity of variance
was significant (F values ranging from 3.24 to 10.42).
3
Separate analyses of variance conducted within each grade level supported these patterns. The effects of questioning-timing were significant for
each grade, F(2, 179) = 3.30, p < .04; F(2, 179) = 3.96, p < .05; F(2,
179) = 30.55, p < .001; F(2, 179) = 18.07, p < .001; for college,
lOth-grade, 7th-grade, and 4th-grade students, respectively.
4
Separate analyses of variance conducted within each timing condition
supported these patterns. The effects of grade were significant for each
condition, F(3, 236) = 57.73, F(3, 236) = 33.84, F(3, 236) = 7.55, all
ps < .001, for the during-reading, after-reading, and control conditions,
respectively.
QUESTIONING EFFECTS ON NARRATIVE COMPREHENSION
questions are asked, whereas recall for structurally important information remains unchanged. This possibility would ensue if
important information tends to be encoded strongly even under
regular (i.e., nonquestioning) reading conditions and, therefore,
extra attention due to questioning only affects encoding of peripheral information (Cassidy & DeLoache, 1995).
In contrast, according to the specific-attention hypothesis, questioning prompts readers to encode specific relations between questioned and answered information. Therefore, selective enhancement of memory for the content of the questions and
corresponding answers would be observed. Memory for other,
nontargeted information would not improve or might even decline.
Effects on targeted information. To investigate whether questioning effects are general or specific, story statements were coded
as to whether they were part of a question or answer. A story
statement was classified as queried if it was part of one of the
questions and as unqueried otherwise. The vast majority of readers' answers contained information explicitly mentioned in the
text, so the following analyses pertain to those answers. The
frequency with which each story statement was included in readers' answers was calculated. To allow direct comparison with the
effect of query, a median split was applied: Story statements that
were given as answer by less than 50% of the readers were coded
as rarely answered; those given by 50% or more, as frequently
answered.
A 2 X 2 (query by answer) analysis was conducted on recall in
the two questioning conditions to examine the effects of inclusion
in question or answer on recall. There was a main effect for query,
F(l, 716) = 19.39, p < .001: Story statements that were part of a
question were remembered better (.49) than were story statements
that were not part of questions (.40). There was a strong main
effect for answer, F(l, 716) = 100.03,/> < .0001: Story statements
included in answers to questions were remembered much better
(.54) than were statements that were not given as answers (.35).
There was no interaction between query and answer, F(l,
716) = 1.99, p > .10. The fact that queried and frequently
answered story statements were retained better suggests that questioning directs readers' attention to specific targeted story
statements.
Because grade and questioning timing were found to influence
comprehension in the first analysis, additional analyses were carried out to assess whether either of these two variables interacted
with the query and the answer effects. We performed analyses
separately for each of the latter factors. With regard to the effect of
query, the three-way (query by timing by grade) ANOVA confirmed the main effects for query, timing, and grade and the
interaction between grade and timing described in the earlier
analyses. Most important, the three-way interaction was not significant, F(6, 696) < 1, nor were the Grade X Query and the
Timing X Query interactions, F(3, 696) = 1.04, p > .25 and F(2,
696) < 1, respectively. Thus, the effects of being queried generalized across grades and across the two questioning conditions. To
eliminate the possibility that these effects resulted from content
differences between the queried and unqueried statements, we
compared recall for the same statements in the control condition.
There were no differences in recall between the two sets of
statements for any of the age groups (all ts < 1.52). Thus, the
above results are not due to content confounding.
525
With regard to the effect of answer, the three-way (answer by
timing by grade) interaction was not significant, F(6, 696) < 1.
Neither the two-way interaction between grade and answer nor that
between timing and answer was significant, F(3, 696) = 1.26, p >
.25 and F(2, 696) < 1, respectively. Thus, being part of readers'
answers to questions has a powerful effect on readers' memory for
that information, regardless of grade or question timing.
Effects on untargeted information. The patterns of results in
the above analyses point to the conclusion that story statements
targeted by questioning are remembered better than are untargeted
statements. These analyses, however, do not address the possibility
that questioning also affects recall of information that is not
targeted by the questions. If the specific-attention hypothesis is
correct, then questioning does not affect untargeted information. If,
however, the general-attention hypothesis is correct, then questioning also improves nontargeted information. An additional analysis
was conducted to address this issue.
A Grade X Timing ANOVA was carried out on story statements
that were both unqueried and rarely answered. Students in the
different grades recalled different amounts of untargeted information, F(3, 189) = 12.86, p < .001. Not surprisingly, recall for
untargeted information increased with age. More interestingly,
readers recalled different amounts of untargeted story statements
under different questioning timing, F(2, 189) = 4.80, p < .01.
Because the interaction between grade and questioning timing was
significant, F(6, 189) = 2.53, p < .05, and the purpose for this set
of analyses was to determine the source of the effects of questioning on untargeted information, we identified the effects of questioning timing for each grade level. College students and 10thgrade students recalled equivalent proportions of untargeted
information in the different questioning-timing conditions, F(2,
34) < 1 and F(2, 43) = 1.75, p > .10, respectively. Thus,
questioning had no effect on untargeted information for these two
grade levels. Seventh-grade students' performance differed across
questioning-timing conditions, F(2, 56) = 6.93, p < .01. Specifically, compared with the case of the control condition (.39), their
recall was reduced by questioning after reading (.19), «(30) = 3.58,
p < .01, but not by questioning during reading (.29), t(\9) = 1.24,
p > .20. Likewise, 4th-grade students' recall differed substantially
across questioning conditions, F(2, 64) = 6.90, p < .01, with
lower recall for during-reading questioning (.07) than for afterreading questioning (.16), ?(37) = 2.22, p < .05, and with lower
recall in both conditions than in the control condition (.30),
r(34) = 4.17, p < .01 and t(43) = 2.31, p < .05 for during- and
after-reading questioning, respectively. At the 7th- and 4th-grade
levels, questioning suppressed readers' recall of untargeted information. Thus, older, more proficient readers' comprehension of
general, untapped information was free of the influence of questioning procedures. This is consistent with the specific-attention
hypothesis. Younger, less proficient readers' comprehension of the
untargeted information was inhibited, which is in direct contradiction to the general-attention hypothesis.
Discussion
In this research, we investigated three major questions: First,
what are the effects of during-reading and after-reading questioning on reading comprehension. Second, do any such effects differ
across grades? And third, what is the source of questioning effects?
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VAN DEN BROEK, TZENG, RISDEN, TRABASSO, AND BASCHE
In particular, we addressed the issue of whether the effects of
questioning stem from enhanced attention to the text as a whole
(the general-attention hypothesis) or from the construction of
specific connections between parts of the text targeted by questions (the specific-attention hypothesis).
Questioning clearly affected comprehension. The effect of questioning was moderated, however, by readers' reading proficiencies. Thus, there was an interaction between questioning and
reading abilities (Seretny & Dean, 1986; Tal, Siegel, & Maraun,
1994). In our study, college students' comprehension benefited
from questions during reading but not from questions after reading.
In contrast, 4th-grade students' comprehension deteriorated substantially in after-reading questioning and even more dramatically
in during-reading questioning. Seventh- and lOth-grade students
generally suffered from questioning, except for 7th-grade students
in during-reading questioning. Overall, the magnitude of the decrease in comprehension for the 7th- and lOth-grade levels was not
as large as that for 4th-grade students.
Thus, reading proficiency determines both whether questioning
helps or hinders comprehension and the degree of any such effects.
The fact that very proficient readers benefit from questioning is
consistent with the general consensus on the effects of adjunct
questions on comprehension. The fact that less-proficient readers
suffer from questioning may seem surprising given that adjunct
questions often are used particularly to assist this segment of the
reading population. However, it is consistent with negative results
on question answering observed by others (e.g., Miller & Pressley,
1989).
The specific patterns of findings suggest an important role for
the readers' management of attentional or working-memory resources.5 Prior research has demonstrated that young and lessskilled readers may find their working-memory capacity considerably taxed by the basic reading processes such as word
identification and syntactical decomposition, as well as by the
demands of their self-generated comprehension processes (e.g.,
Carpenter et al., 1994; Oakhill & Yuill, 1996). Against this backdrop, questioning poses an additional burden for the cognitive
processes in comprehension. During-reading questioning may
place a heavy demand on readers' working memory because they
have to deal simultaneously with their normal reading processes
and with the questions. This account is consistent with the observation that for the least skilled readers, the 4th-grade students,
comprehension was especially compromised when questioning
occurred during reading. It is possible that questions posed after
reading might also tax young readers' ability to construct a coherent representation, for example by interfering with the final integration and organization of the textual information. Such effects
may be, however, weaker than those of questioning during reading.
Indeed, this is what was observed in the present study. Thus,
questioning appears to interfere with young readers' comprehension because the questions compete with other ongoing processes
for the limited working-memory capacity available to the reader.
As working-memory capacity increases with age, the effects of
this competition diminish. As a result, proficient readers can take
advantage of the questions and of how they direct strategic allocation of attention. For them, the effects of questions are strongest
during the reading process itself, as the representation of the text
is being constructed (e.g., Goldman et al., 1996; van den Broek et
al., 1999). As these readers proceed through the text, they inter-
connect the encountered information and transfer the information
and connections into their developing memory representation.
Questions at this time may direct attention to specific parts of the
text and increase the likelihood and strength of their representation. At least for easy texts, the representation is largely constructed by the time reading is completed, and hence, effects of
questioning at that time are minimal.
For the proficient readers, the effects of questioning are concentrated in frequently answered information and, to a lesser
extent, in queried information. Thus, questioning directs readers'
attention toward the targeted information. These results are consistent with the specific-attention hypothesis and with the above
account of the role of attention allocation. They also dovetail with
previously reported selective-attention effects of questioning on
memory. For example, elaborative-interrogation procedures improve associative memory for geographic facts, but only for those
facts consistent with the queried associations (Martin & Pressley,
1991; see also Cassidy & DeLoache, 1995; Liu, 1985). The
specific-attention hypothesis is supported further by our finding
that college and lOth-grade students' memory for untargeted information (i.e., information not contained in questions or answers)
was not affected by questioning. For these readers, no additional
attention was directed to untargeted information.
For the younger children, questioning inhibited memory for both
untargeted and targeted information. For these readers, questioning
procedures create severe resource competition between the requirements of normal reading and the demands of handling questions. As a result, their ability to attend to and, hence, remember all
parts of the text was reduced.
According to this account, questioning might benefit younger
children provided that the attentional demands of the comprehension task are reduced. Indeed, when the need for decoding is
eliminated via aural presentation of the stories, even very young
(3rd-grade and preschool) children's comprehension may benefit
from questioning (Liu, 1985; Palincsar & Brown, 1984). Conversely, questioning might interfere even with skilled readers'
comprehension if the reading task is highly demanding, for example when the content or structure of the text is complicated or
unfamiliar to the reader.
Although the present results indicate an important role for the
timing of questions, other aspects of questions also determine their
efficacy in directing readers' attention. One important aspect, for
example, concerns the type of questions posed. When reading
expository texts, readers search their text memory and background
knowledge more frequently and extensively in response to "why"
questions than in response to "how" or "what happens next"
questions (Graesser & Franklin, 1990; see also Millis & Barker,
1996). Similar effects of question type are likely to exist for
narratives. They are consistent with our focus on the role of
inferential questions in promoting connections between text elements. To ensure optimal use of questions to facilitate comprehension, it is fruitful to investigate the unique and joint effects of
question properties—such as timing and type—on readers' construction of a coherent text representation.
The present results were obtained using one measure of comprehension, memory for textual information. However, compre' We thank Arthur Graesser for suggesting this interpretation.
QUESTIONING EFFECTS ON NARRATIVE COMPREHENSION
hension consists of more than just being able to remember the
information from a text. To obtain a complete picture of the effects
of different types of questioning procedures, it is imperative to
explore other outcome measures of comprehension, such as the
ability to summarize the text or identify the theme, to apply the
textual information, and so on (cf. Pressley & McCormick, 1996).
The results of this study have important implications for educational practice. Our findings suggest that questioning can be
used to direct the attention of students to specific information and
to prompt them to encode specific connections. However, teachers
should be careful in using questions to enhance comprehension
until students reach an adequate level of reading proficiency.
Moreover, the timing of questioning matters. Questions during
reading are likely to have more profound effects—for better or for
worse—than questions after reading. For proficient readers, questions during reading elicit processes over and above those in which
they would engage spontaneously, thereby leading to increased
memory. Conversely, for less-proficient readers, the potential for
interference is greater for questions posed during reading than for
those posed after reading is completed. Questions are a powerful
tool to direct the cognitive processes that take place during reading. Understanding under what circumstances and by what mechanisms questioning affects comprehension is essential for the
systematic and appropriate use of questions as an instructional
tool.
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Appendix
Experimental Stories With Questions as They Appeared in the During-Reading Condition
Brian Story
There once was a boy named Brian.
Brian liked to perform for people.
One day Brian's teacher said that she was going to choose children for a
school show next month.
Brian wanted to be chosen.
Q: According to what you know about Brian from this story, why did Brian
want to be chosen for the school show?
Brian told his teacher that he could sing.
He began to play the piano.
He sang a song, but not that well.
Brian's teacher did not choose him.
Q: In this story, what did Brian do to try to be chosen for the school show?
Brian wanted to put on a good magic act.
Q: In this story, why did Brian want to put on a good magic act?
Brian bought some magic cards and a magician's hat.
He set up the cards and hat on a table.
Then he tried to do some tricks with the cards.
Brian found that the tricks were difficult to perform.
Q: What did Brian do in order to try to put on a magic act?
Brian wanted to learn how to perform many kinds of magic tricks.
Q: Why did Brian want to leam how to perform many kinds of magic
tricks?
Brian called some magic schools.
He went to a magic school.
Brian asked the magician if he would teach him.
The magician told Brian to come to the school the next day.
Q: In this story, what did Brian do in order to take magic lessons?
Brian went to magic school every day for a month.
He watched how each trick was done.
He practiced the tricks over and over.
Brian finally learned how to perform many kinds of magic tricks.
Q: What did Brian do in order to leam how to perform many kinds of
magic tricks?
Q: How did Brian leam to do the magic tricks?
Brian tried to use the magic cards and hat once again.
Q: Why did Brian try using his magic cards and hat a second time?
Brian practiced many kinds of tricks.
He picked out the tricks that he could do the best for his act.
Brian had put together a really good magic act.
Q: In this story, what did Brian do in order to put together a really good
magic act?
Q: How did Brian decide which tricks would go into his act?
Then Brian showed his teacher his magic act.
Q: In this story, why did Brian show his teacher his magic act?
Brian made some flowers come out of his teacher's ear.
Then he made the flowers disappear.
Brian's magic act was chosen to be the special act for the school show.
Q: In this story, what did Brian do in order to have his magic act chosen
to be the special act for the school show?
Q: How was Brian's magic act chosen to be in the school show?
Igor Story
There was once a baker named Igor.
Igor liked baking cakes, pies, and cookies.
QUESTIONING EFFECTS ON NARRATIVE COMPREHENSION
A customer called Igor's bakery and ordered a birthday cake.
Igor wanted to sell him a special cake.
Q: According to this story, why did Igor want to sell a special cake to the
customer?
He looked on his bakery shelves.
He examined every cake he had.
Igor did not find any cakes that were special.
Q: In this story, what did Igor do in order to try to find a special cake for
his customer?
Igor wanted to bake a special angel-food cake.
Q: According to the story, why did Igor want to bake a special angel-food
cake?
Igor took out an angel-food cake recipe.
He read that he should first beat several egg whites until they turned fluffy.
He beat the egg whites in a small bowl.
But the egg whites did not become fluffy.
Q: In this story, what did Igor do in order to try to make an angel-food
cake?
Igor wanted to learn how to make fluffy egg whites without any mistakes.
Q: In this story, why did Igor want to leam how to make fluffy egg whites
without any mistakes?
So, Igor called a master baker named Julia.
Igor asked Julia to teach him how to make fluffy egg whites.
Julia agreed to teach Igor.
Q: In this story, what did Igor do in order to have Julia teach him?
Igor watched Julia beat the egg whites quickly until they became fluffy.
Igor practiced everything that Julia taught him.
Igor finally learned how to make fluffy egg whites correctly.
529
Q: In this story, what did Igor do in order to learn how to make fluffy egg
whites correctly?
Q: How did Igor learn to make the fluffy egg whites?
Then Igor beat some new egg whites in a large bowl until they turned
fluffy.
Q: In this story, why did Igor beat some new egg whites a second time?
Igor added the rest of the cake ingredients to the fluffy egg whites.
He put the mixture in the oven. When the angel-food cake was baked, it
looked just right.
Q: In this story, what did Igor finally do in order to make a cake that looked
just right?
Q: How did Igor make the cake so that when it was baked it looked just
right?
Igor took it out and decorated the angel-food cake with strawberries and
icing.
Q: In this story, why did Igor decorate the angel-food cake with strawberries and icing?
He put the cake on a silver platter.
When the customer came to the bakery, Igor showed him the decorated
angel-food cake.
The customer bought the cake.
Q: In this story, what did Igor do in order to sell the angel-food cake to his
customer?
Q: How did Igor ensure that the customer would get a special cake?
Received February 5, 1999
Revision received February 8, 2001
Accepted February 9, 2001 •
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