Out of Her Mind -- Musings on Education and Life

Knowledge is in the driver's seat; Verbal Efficiency Theory Represented Concretely as a School Bus A Response to Chapter 6 of Perfett's (1985) Reading Ability : “Verbal Efficiency Theory.” see also Perfetti's (2007) "Reading Ability: Lexical Quality to Comprehension,"in Scientific Studies of Reading.   Summary and Response. In this chapter, Perfetti outlines verbal efficiency theory as a way to explain individual reading differences. He explains that reading ability is multi-faceted, and that reading can be understood in terms of cost and product (comprehension). If memory and attention is reduced, processing will be inefficient. In order for a process to be efficient, comprehension quality is considered in relation to the level of expenditure within each processing resource. Schema activation and lexical access should be ideally low in energy expenditure while propositional encoding should take the bulk of the effort. When these processes are o

Teacher Bobbi In this course, the Psychological Processes of Reading, many of my notions of what the brain does while it reads were solidified. Prior to this course, I had studied several theories of reading, but this course helped me to synthesize those, to understand their historical development, and to see that several reading theories, although partially disproven, still hold value to the researcher and the reading teacher. Furthermore, I began to understand reading comprehension with more depth. As any serious student of reading knows, there are two important reading theories regarding attention and automaticity. LaBerge and Samuels (1994;1974) first posited that reading is like playing a musical instrument or a sport: that you overlearn the lower processes (like reading the music or memorizing the plays) so that the brain will be able to focus on the more difficult aspects of the activity (playing the music or executing the play). In reading, Automaticity Theory explains t

. "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 summari