The Cognitive Development of Reading and Reading Comprehension

Carol McDonald Connor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317439530
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Learning to read may be the most complex cognitive operation that children are expected to master, and the latest research in cognitive development has offered important insights into how children succeed or fail at this task. The Cognitive Development of Reading and Reading Comprehension is a multidisciplinary, evidence-based resource for teachers and researchers that examines reading comprehension from a cognitive development perspective, including the principal theories and methods used in the discipline. The book combines research into basic cognitive processes—genetics, perception, memory, executive functioning, and language—with an investigation of the effects that context and environment have on literacy outcomes, making clear how factors such as health, family life, community, policy, and ecology can influence children's cognitive development.

Chapter 1
Introduction to the Cognitive Development of Reading

Carol McDonald Connor and Jennifer L. Weston

The study of cognitive development has been essential in understanding how children learn to read, what has to happen for them to learn to read proficiently, and the sources of influence on reading development. Learning to read may be the most complex cognitive task we expect all children to master—it is much like expecting all children to become chess masters. And the stakes are much higher. Children who do not read well are more likely to drop out of high school, become teen parents, or enter the criminal justice system (Reynolds, Temple, Robertson, & Mann, 2002). Research in cognitive development has offered important insights into how children succeed or fail learning to read. For example, one might believe that learning to talk is more difficult than learning to read but research shows that we are essentially hardwired to learn how to talk (Dunbar, 1996). We are not wired to learn to read. Reading is a human invention that is between 5000 and 3500 years old (Campbell, 2013) whereas we humans have been talking for over 100,000 years at least. Because reading is an invention, learning to read essentially coopts parts of the brain originally designed for other tasks, like language, memory, and perception.

Therefore, children need careful and highly technical instruction if they are to learn to read and write well (Adams, 1990). First they must master the alphabetic principle—that letters stand for sounds and that these letters combine to create words that have meaning. Then they have to learn how to make sense of what they have decoded, which is even more difficult. Unfortunately, because it is a polyglot, English is among the most difficult languages to read and write: the spelling is irregular and the vocabulary is vast. That said, cognitive development research indicates that virtually all children can learn to read and write. The study of reading and writing offers a window into understanding the breadth and depth of research in cognitive development. This edited book is developed to be a resource for researchers, teachers, and for university courses on reading and/or cognitive development. For this edited volume, we are focusing on reading comprehension rather than more basic processes such as phonological awareness, phonics, and fluency. At the same time, unless these more fundamental processes are fluent and automatic, children with have a great deal of difficulty understanding what it is they are trying to decode.

Learning Theories and Learning to Read

How a 6-year-old reads and understands is very different than the way a college student reads and understands. Hence, as we think about reading and cognitive development, learning is a critical aspect of developing proficient reading comprehension skills. Webster’s dictionary defines learning as “the activity or process of gaining knowledge or skill by studying, practicing, being taught, or experiencing something: the activity of someone who learns.” Throughout the ages, philosophers have discussed learning. Soon after psychology was established as a science, the empirical study of learning began. Many early psychologists subscribed to the experimental method of introspection, a self-analysis of one’s own perceptions. Behaviorism and the behaviorist theories of learning developed in response to the limitations of introspection techniques. In direct comparison to introspection, behaviorists relied on observable behavior assuming that an individual’s feelings of mastery or learning were not as important as his actual behavior.

Three theories of learning came out of the behaviorist school of thought: connectionism, classical conditioning, and operant conditioning. Modern learning theories have grown out of these early learning theories. At the same time, cognitive theories of learning expanded on social psychology theories. Although there are many learning theories, here we focus on three that can help us understand how children learn to read: social learning theory (Bandura, 1977b); Anderson’s cognitive skill theory (Anderson, 1982, 1996); and the model of domain learning (Alexander, 2006).

Social Learning Theory

The theory of social learning postulated by Bandura (1977b) was one of the first cognitive theories of learning. Social cognitive theory holds that knowledge, skills, strategies, beliefs, and attitudes, along with how to behave correctly in situations, may be learned by observing others. This theory makes a distinction between learning and performance, and hypothesizes that what we learn depends on a variety of internal and external factors. Bandura (1977a) stressed the social nature of learning, hypothesizing two types of learning: enactive and vicarious learning. Enactive learning is learning by enacting a behavior and observing the consequences. In contrast to operant conditioning, social cognitive theory holds that consequences inform and motivate behavior rather than simply strengthen behavior. Vicarious learning is learning without overt completion of a behavior. Vicarious learning is done by watching or listening to models of instruction. These models may take many forms and include human models, text, and even television. The advantage of vicarious learning is that it allows the learning of information and skills that might be difficult to learn from interactions with the environment. Cycles of vicarious and enactive learning, along with corrective feedback, are necessary for learning, according to social cognitive theory.

Thus, one way children learn to read is through modeling or imitating behaviors. Modeling is a combination of both vicarious and enactive learning. Social cognitive theory stresses that imitation is an instinct that is conditioned from birth (Bandura, 1977a). Modeling allows learners to acquire increasingly complex skills. For example, children who see their parents read for pleasure are more likely to enjoy reading themselves. Indeed, even before they learn to read, children pretend to read if they have been given a model (e.g., a parent or teacher) and are more likely to read well if their parents spend more time reading with them (Debaryshe, 1993; Whitehurst et al., 1988).

Zimmerman (1990) expanded on the social learning theory by being more specific about the nature of the internal and external factors that influence learning and performance. He defined self-regulated learning as active learning, with the learner not just performing actions but also taking an active role in their learning. One of the most important tenants of self-regulated learning is that the learner is aware of what they have and have not learned. Furthermore, self-regulated learners view their learning process as under their control. This makes it easier for them to overcome obstacles. The learning process in self-regulated learning involves the steps of planning, goal setting, self-monitoring and self-evaluation of learning. Being knowledgeable about one’s own learning allows for the proper allocation of resources. For example, if children are aware that they are struggling, they may seek out help. Not only are self-regulated learners aware of their learning, they are also aware of the impact of their actions on their learning. Self-regulation falls along a continuum ranging from very high to very low. Moreover, levels of self-regulation may vary from task to task. The decision to self-regulate, or not, may depend on external factors, including explicit instruction in, for example, writing (Graham, Harris, & Mason, 2005).

Children can be taught how to regulate their own learning, particularly with regard to reading and writing. For example, Harris and Graham have developed an effective writing intervention that incorporates the explicit teaching of self-regulated strategy use (Graham, et al., 2005).

Cognitive Skill Theory

Anderson’s cognitive skill theory (1982) differs from social cognitive theory both in scope and design by focusing on the nature of changes in developing skills over time. Basing his theory on work by Fitts (1964), Anderson postulates three stages of skill acquisition: the declarative stage, knowledge compilation, and the procedural stage. The first stage involves encoding the information necessary to complete a skill. The second stage is the transition phase; this includes the conversion of information into a procedure that can be practiced. The fixing of any errors present in the initial encoding of the skill also occurs during the compilation stage. The third stage continues indefinitely. It involves the continual practice and improvement of the skill. Skill acquisition theory is the basis of Anderson’s ACT Model (1996) in which declarative knowledge is represented as a network, and procedural knowledge is represented as a series of production rules. Control over both cognition and behavior in this model is a result of production rules. Learning in cognitive skill theory is considered very differently than learning in the prior theories.

Initial skill learning involves the learning of facts, or the acquisition of declarative knowledge. This would be similar to learning the letters of the alphabet for a young child. Declarative knowledge is interpreted using general production rules. General rules are used because instruction rarely informs the learner about what procedures are to be used to apply the information. These general problem-solving rules are crucial to the skill acquisition theory, because these rules are universally used to bridge gaps between declarative knowledge and behaviors.

In the second stage, compilation is initially slow, as the general production rules are used to produce behavior and then speeds up as appropriate behaviors are found and the need for rehearsal is diminished. For example, children no longer need to sound out words letter by letter because they recognize the words automatically.

The procedural stage is the practice stage in which novices progress and begin to gain expertise. Increased practice results in both generalization and discrimination, although trial and error do play a part in the development of these processes. The cognitive skill theory is very good at explaining learning in well-defined domains, such as mathematics, and for understanding the acquisition of early decoding and comprehension skills. However, it is less useful when trying to explain reading comprehension when children are expected to read more critically, compare the meaning of various texts, and make inferences about what they are reading.

Model of Domain Learning

Alexander’s model of domain learning brings together aspects of each of the prior theories of learning. Like Anderson’s (1982) theory, the model of domain learning is a stage-based learning theory. Unlike the cognitive skill theory, the model of domain learning takes into account individual factors much like those considered in social learning theory (Bandura, 1977b). The model of domain learning is a model of the development of expertise and includes three stages: acclimation, competency, and proficiency or expertise.

The three stages of the model of domain learning can be explained by looking at the characteristics of learners in each of these categories and how their knowledge, interest and strategic processing differ. Individuals in the acquisition stage will have fragmented or incomplete knowledge of the task and the domain. These individuals might rely on situational interest, or their response to the aspects of the task that are enticing, including novelty and compensation (Mitchell, 1993). Strategies are used during the acclimation phase. However, strategy use is generally limited to surface strategies such as rereading or paraphrasing (Alexander, 2003). Once an individual has acquired a sufficient amount of knowledge as well as cohesive understanding of the domain, they enter the stage of competence. Readers in the acclimation phase may struggle with any or all aspects of reading including decoding, vocabulary knowledge, and comprehension. Readers in this stage may gravitate towards books on topics that interest them or that contain pictures that can aid in understanding.

In the stage of competence, situational interest decreases in influencing learning while individual interest increases. A change also occurs in strategy use, with individuals using a mix of surface level and deep processing strategies including such activities as critiquing texts and comparing them to other texts. The progression to expertise is not assured for any skill, including reading. Children may be competent but not expert readers into adulthood. For readers to be successful in today’s society it is necessary that they read at a minimum of the competency level. This level of expertise allows individuals to, for instance, compare the labels of three medications to choose the best one for their ailment.

Expertise (Ericsson, 2006) is marked by possessing a broad principled knowledge base and requires that the individual contributes to the domain—for example, successful novelists might be consider expert readers under this definition. Experts are highly interested (i.e., individual interest). Situational interest is less important. Experts rely heavily on deep processing strategies. Of course, an expert in one field (the novelist) may be in the acclimation stage in another field (e.g., writing textbooks). Expertise may be either domain specific or domain general. For example, if a child is an expert reader, this expertise may generalize to other domains in which they have to read text (e.g., reading Harry Potter versus a history textbook). However, this expertise may not transfer to other less related domains, such as art or music.

Cognitive Theories of Reading

There are many theories about the processes underlying skilled reading, such as Chall’s stage theory (Chall, 1996), the Construction-Integration Model (Kintsch, 1988), and the lexical quality hypothesis (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014) that are directly informed by cognitive theories on learning. However, theories of language learning have also informed theories of reading, including the whole language theory of reading (Goodman, 1970), which purported that learning to read was like learning to talk. This theory has been largely abandoned as greater appreciation for the invented nature and neurological basis of reading and reading disabilities became clearer (Shaywitz, et al., 2002). Among the most influential and well-supported theories of reading is the simple view of reading (Hoover & Gough, 1990) where proficient reading comprehension is the product of fluent decoding and proficient listening comprehension (i.e., oral language). If either is weak, then reading comprehension is compromised. However, the role of instruction is missing in these theories and so emerging theories have started borrowing from developmental psychology and biology and applying dynamic systems theories (Mitchell, 2011; Yoshikawa & Hsueh, 2001). We briefly review Chall’s (Chall, 1996) stage theory, the Construction-Integration Model, the lexical hypothesis theory, and finally emerging theories, such as the Lattice Model (Connor, et al., 2014), that borrow from dynamic systems theory and include the role of instruction.

Stage Theory

Chall’s (1996) stage theory covers life span reading from acquisition through reading for a purpose where individuals progress through six stages of learning to read. Although originally Chall assigned ages to each stage, later research suggested that learning to read can transcend maturational milestones and that the stages are not strictly sequential and can be concurrent.

In sta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction to the Cognitive Development of Reading
• 2 Behavioral and Molecular Genetic Influences on Reading-Related Outcomes
• 3 Perception, Reading, and Digital Media
• 4 Memory and Learning to Read
• 5 Self-Regulation and Reading Achievement
• 6 The Role of Language Development in the Successful Comprehension of Texts
• 7 Self-Perception and Perspective Taking: How Beliefs About Oneself and Others May Influence Reading
• 8 The Influence of Psychological and Physical Health on Reading
• 9 Parenting Influences on Children’s Cognitive Development
• 10 Ecological Influences on Literacy
• 11 Policy and Community Influences on Learning to Read
• 12 Using Cognitive Development Research to Inform Literacy Instruction and Improve Practice in the Classroom
• 13 Conclusions, Future Directions, and Questions for Discussion
• List of Contributors
• Index