Realizing That You Don't Understand: Elementary School Children's Awareness of Inconsistencies

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Two factors were proposed to affect awareness of comprehension failure: the inferential processing requirements and the kind of standards against which comprehension is evaluated. These studies investigated elementary school children''s awareness of their own comprehension failure when presented with inconsistent information. Children were more likely to notice explicit than implicit contradictions. Even 12 yr olds judged as comprehensible a sizable proportion of essays with seemingly obvious inconsistencies. Yet, the children had good probed recall of the information, the logical capacity to draw the inferences and were not generally reluctant to question the experimenter. In subsequent studies children were asked to repeat sentences to guarantee that the 2 inconsistent propositions were concurrently activated in working memory and warned about the existence of a problem to promote more careful evaluation. To notice inconsistencies, children apparently have to encode and store the information, draw the relevant inferences, retrieve and maintain the (inferred) propositions in working memory and compare them. [Children 3rd-6th graders] do not spontaneously carry out those processes that they are capable of carrying out.