Comprehension Strategies: A Response to Walczyk's 1994 "The Development of Verbal Efficiency, Metacognitive Strategies, and Their Interplay"

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"The Development of Verbal Efficiency, Metacognitive Strategies, and Their Interplay" (Walczyk, 1994) uses Perfetti's (1985) Verbal Efficiency Theory as the lens with which to view the construct of comprehension.  The following is a response to a couple of questions raised by Dr. Omer Ari in regards to this article.

1. On page 182, Walczyk discusses “compensatory mechanisms” and the conditions under which they may be used. What does he mean by “compensatory mechanisms”?
Compensatory mechanisms are the comprehension strategies students might use to repair comprehension.  These strategies require that the reader be metacognitive.  Once a breakdown in reading comprehension has been detected, the reader has several courses of action, depending upon where the breakdown occurred.  For example, a student can read slower.  If the information decays in working memory, the reader can re-read the text (or that portion of the text).  The reader can pause to summarize text and to integrate propositions.  All of this strategies can be used when the reader is not under time constraints (i.e. standardized testing). 



2. Walczyk argues that older readers and adults compensate for inefficient lower level processes, limited resources or difficulty of text when reading under normal (non-pressured) conditions.  How do you think Walczyk might explain the poor readers’ failure to monitor their comprehension in the Long and Chong (2001) study?* Recall that subjects read passages in Long and Chong’s study at their own pace by pressing a space bar to present the next line, which erased the current line.

In the Long and Chong (2001) study, students were reading with time constraints, so their ability to use "compensatory mechanisms" was automatically hampered:  readers didn't have time to pause and summarize and felt the pressure not to read too slowly.  Also, due to the nature of the exercise, readers could not go back and re-read because text was presented a line at a time and could not be re-visited.  In essence, this exercise measured reading ability without the aid of compensatory measures.  It would be interesting to test how 2 groups of similarly poor readers performed on a measure when they could and could not use comprehension strategies (under timed vs. untimed conditions, I suppose).



*Recall that poor college readers were found to be insensitive to textual inconsistencies in passages where the character description (Bill’s physical condition) was separated by a long filler section from the target action (Bill runs across street quickly and picks up the boy). Remember also that subjects were defined as good vs. poor readers on the basis of a standardized reading test (i.e., Nelson Denny Reading Test).

J.J. Walczyk