THE SCRIPT SCHEMA IN CHILDREN'S COMPREHENSION AND MEMORY (COGNITION, INFORMATION PROCESSING, RECALL).
Item
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Title
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THE SCRIPT SCHEMA IN CHILDREN'S COMPREHENSION AND MEMORY (COGNITION, INFORMATION PROCESSING, RECALL).
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Identifier
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AAI8515658
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identifier
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8515658
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Creator
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SELTZER, JOEL A.
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Contributor
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Shirley Feldmann
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Date
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1985
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Education, Educational Psychology
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Abstract
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This study examined how script strength, prior scriptal knowledge, and age differences affect children's comprehension and memory, and relate to reading skill. A script schema represents stereotypical action sequences of familiar events that are goal-oriented, for example, going-to-a-restaurant. Script strength refers to a script's ability to evoke a familiar temporal-causal sequence of events. Strong--canonical--schemata facilitate story recall. Prior knowledge and experience affect performance as measured by inference-making ability, recall, and errors in recall with words, sentences, and text. Skilled readers spontaneously use strategies that facilitate comprehension and recall.;A strong script was predicted to facilitate comprehension and recall of a picture series. Prior scriptal knowledge was expected to facilitate performance, and older children were predicted to have higher comprehension and recall than their younger counterparts.;The subjects were 139 second- and fourth-grade children. They were shown a picture series evoking the script getting-ready-for-school-in-the-morning. Within each grade, children were randomly assigned to one of six conditions in which a script-header--or title--was presented before or after exposure to the stimuli and varied by three levels of canonical strength. The children were asked to generate a story as a measure of their comprehension and were given traditional memory tasks to measure verbal recall, visual recognition, and serial reconstruction of the pictures.;As predicted, the strong script-header was found to facilitate comprehension and serial reconstruction ability. Children in the weak script-header condition produced more intrusions in their stories. Prior knowledge facilitated only the ability to produce more detailed information. Recall and recognition were not affected by the treatments. Fourth graders performed better than second graders on most tasks. A modest relationship between second grade task performance and reading ability was noted.;It was concluded the children's level of information processing must be consistent throughout a task to facilitate comprehension and recall. Scripts that organize new information to fit the learner's knowledge base may be a useful pedagogical tool.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Educational Psychology
