In what is often called the cognitive revolution (Anderson, 2010), reading theorists and researchers turned their attention to the reader (rather than the text) as the maker of meaning. They redefined comprehension as what happens when a reader, influenced and guided by his or her prior knowledge, interprets a text. This shift led to four major areas of inquiry, as shown in table 1.1.
Table 1.1: Areas of Inquiry for Reading Research During the Cognitive Revolution
| Area of Inquiry | Question |
| Knowledge Structures | How is prior knowledge stored in the brain? |
| Text Structures | How is information stored in a text? |
| Comprehension Strategies | How do students combine prior knowledge and textual information to make meaning? |
| Teaching Techniques | How can educators improve students’ meaning-making skills? |
Here we briefly explain the major ideas associated with each area of inquiry.
Knowledge Structures: Schema Theory
With the acknowledgment that students bring prior knowledge to a text, scientists became interested in how students store that knowledge in their brains and how they access it when reading a text. One of the most prominent models was schema theory. Schema theory describes knowledge in the human brain as “little containers [called schemata] into which we deposit the particular traces of particular experiences, as well as the ‘ideas’ that derive from those experiences” (Pearson & Cervetti, 2017, p. 25). Schema theory became popular as a model of reading comprehension in part because it readily explained common phenomena, such as the human propensity to disagree about the interpretation of various texts—books, movies, newspaper articles, and the like. According to schema theory, disagreements arise because each individual approaches a text with a different, and unique, body of prior knowledge and experiences. Richard C. Anderson (1984) describes some of the additional phenomena that schema theory explained.
• Learning and memory: For different types of texts, our minds have slots that we expect to fill with certain types of information; information that fits in the slots is that which we easily learn and remember.
• Identifying important ideas: The slots in our schemata guide our search for what is important in a text, allowing us to separate main ideas and details.
• Elaboration and inference: No text is ever completely explicit; our schemata help us to make educated guesses about how we should fill certain slots.
In sum, schema theory posits that individuals store information about their experiences using particular structures; understanding those structures helps students access and apply knowledge when reading a text.
Text Structures: Kintsch and Meyer
A parallel line of research examined how texts store information, and how text structures interact with knowledge structures to create meaning. Researchers conceptualized structures in texts as “slots” that a writer fills with particular types of information. A reader who knows what to expect from the slots of a specific text structure will more effectively align his or her prior knowledge to the text and is more likely to comprehend it. According to Walter Kintsch (1983), whose model of text comprehension was, and still is, widely accepted:
Comprehending a text involves the formation of two parallel, complementary structures, the textbase and the situational model. The textbase is a representation of the content of the text, consisting of the elementary propositions derived from the text which are organized into a coherent whole on the basis of some available knowledge structure, e.g. a schema. The situational model is developed in parallel with the text base proper, but it is a richer structure which contains not only the information derived from the text, but also the reader’s previous knowledge about the subject matter. (p. 2)
In simpler terms, readers organize information from a text into a structure (the textbase) and then combine that with what they already know to create a situational model, which they use to make meaning.
Bonnie J. F. Meyer, Carole J. Young, and Brendan J. Bartlett (1989) articulate six specific text structures and investigate the effect of explicitly teaching those text structures on students’ comprehension. In numerous studies since 1971, Meyer and her colleagues find that teaching text structures using techniques such as “direct instruction, modeling, scaffolding, elaborated feedback, and adaptation of instruction to student performance” (Meyer & Ray, 2011, p. 127) improves students’ comprehension significantly (Meyer, 1971, 1975; Meyer et al., 1989; Meyer et al., 2010; Meyer, Brandt, & Bluth, 1980; Meyer & Freedle, 1979, 1984; Meyer & Poon, 2001; Meyer & Rice, 1982).
Table 1.2 lists the six text structures Meyer and her colleagues identify, examples of texts that typically use each structure, and signal words that alert a reader to the presence of each structure.
Table 1.2: Text Structures
Source: Adapted from Meyer et al., 1989; Meyer & Ray, 2011.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction for a free reproducible version of this table.
Research on knowledge and text structures highlighted and explored a reader’s response to a text, rather than meaning inherent in a text. Researchers commonly used metaphors such as reader as builder or reader as creator to describe this collaboration between reader and text.
Comprehension Strategies: Reciprocal Teaching and Metacognition
Many researchers during the cognitive revolution investigated the processes that readers use to make meaning (such as predicting, questioning, elaborating, inferring, clarifying, visualizing, retelling, or summarizing). They commonly referred to these processes as comprehension strategies. Initial research indicated that teaching students to use such strategies improved their comprehension of texts. Moreover, researchers attained even better results when they taught students to use combinations of strategies. The best-known and most-researched combination of strategies from this time is reciprocal teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1984), in which a reader stops regularly while reading a text to engage in four strategies—(1) prediction, (2) questioning, (3) clarification, and (4) summarization—and selects those most appropriate to the comprehension challenges in the text.
Researchers also delved into the metacognitive strategies that students use to monitor their comprehension while reading. These processes include:
• Awareness—Paying attention to one’s thoughts
• Monitoring—Recognizing when understanding breaks down
• Control—Selecting a strategy to fix the problem
• Evaluation—Judging how well one has resolved a problem and if further
