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Since there is no reading without content, or something to read about, Beck and McKeown emphasize the parallels between reading and reasoning, which also cannot take place except in relation to subject matter and existing knowledge. Thus, these researchers study reading as a form of reasoning they call "text processing," which requires learners "to engage closely with texts--monitoring comprehension, compensating for gaps in content, identifying ambiguities, categorizing details, evaluating arguments, tracking the narrative flow, and otherwise exercising considerable skill." Reading at this level, of course, is a higher-order business than exercising the basic set of abilities identified and analyzed by Charles Perfetti. It is exemplified by the students in Chi's studies who were able to induce concepts from text that did not describe or explain them. In the case of Beck and McKeown's studies, however, it is the researchers themselves who engage in this close, process-oriented examination of texts and reading in order to analyze in complex detail what successful reading entails and to diagnose problems that texts create for readers.
When Beck and McKeown set out to study how and why children learn, or fail to learn, from social studies texts, they focused on four segments of a fifth-grade text about the pre-Revolutionary War period in United States history. They regarded these segments--on the French and Indian War, the concept of no taxation without representation, the Intolerable Acts, and the Boston Tea Party--as representative in their failings and erroneous assumptions about readers' existing knowledge. McKeown says, "We asked students--before they read each piece of text--some things that we thought the text was assuming they already knew, and, as we suspected, the students didn't have this background knowledge. We also thought each piece of text itself was problematic. It was not coherent. It didn't hang together. It didn't explain things well." Not surprisingly, questions administered after children had read the text segments showed that they did not learn what the text intended them to learn.
None of this broke new ground in the field, since other researchers had observed similar failures of text and comprehension and had described them in general terms. The important difference in Beck and McKeown's work lay in the depth and specificity of both their analysis and their reporting, the precise detail in which they investigated just how and where student comprehension broke down and what sorts of confusion emerged in lieu of understanding. They regarded it as essential to find and then communicate in a deeper way what happened in actual interactions with text--to identify exactly why one piece of text works better than another instead of saying merely that one was clearer or better organized.
In the effort to delineate just what made a text clear or well organized, Beck and McKeown looked closely at texts that were neither. They performed their analysis against a backdrop of cognitive research on comprehension and learning from text. Just as cognitive psychology is concerned with "getting inside" the process of learning rather than with observing the outward manifestations of performance, Beck and McKeown's interest was with getting inside the instruction so that their findings could be understood in relation to the learning process.
The aspects of cognitive research that guided these researchers' analysis were recent understandings of the complex nature of the reading process, with emphasis on its interaction with a reader's knowledge, and characteristics of texts that can promote or impede comprehension. The analysis consisted of examining sequences of text material and hypothesizing the learning that seemed likely for young students based on judgment of the background knowledge that could be expected and on consideration of the effects of characteristics of text on the reading process.
Beck and McKeown began by identifying points at which confusion or incomprehension appeared in students' understanding of the American history texts they had selected. Then they conducted a cognitive, or text-processing, "simulation" of the students experience; that is, they performed an in-depth, phrase-by-phrase analysis that considered what a child would do with a lesson or piece of text. The researchers, at each point in the text, would ask, What would come to mind as a student read the text? Where would they lose the narrative thread? What concepts were poorly explained and why? How could the text be improved? This fine-grained analysis, Beck says, was "an attempt to understand things below the surface, to get at the processes that we know underlie reading and learning and to describe them."
After the researchers identified weak points in both the content and the structure of the text, they began revising the text so that it did explain what they thought needed to be explained for children to understand why the Revolution happened and what went on between the British and the Colonists. They also developed supplementary instructional materials that included concepts and factual material that students would need as background knowledge in order to compensate for textual gaps. The text-revision process was, in effect, a demonstration of the attention to detail that Beck and McKeown saw as necessary for textual clarity and coherence. Considerable change in text emerged as the researchers thought deeply and carefully about the interactions that should take place between readers and the text. A single textual passage provides a striking example:
The first sentence of the original text section of the French and Indian War said, "In 1763 Britain and the Colonies ended the seven-year war with the French and Indians." Beck says, "The first thing we say when we look at that is, there are two things wrong. First, it starts in the wrong place, with the end of a war that has not previously been mentioned. Second, it is unbelievably information dense. From that sentence, you're supposed to understand that a war existed, that it was fought for seven years, that Britain and the Colonies were on one side and the French and Indians on the other."
The revision of that single sentence generated seven sentences in its place. The first of these read: "About 250 years ago, Britain and France both claimed to own some of the same land here in North America." Beck comments, "I could go through and tell you why we did that and why we made every other change we made to that text. The major focus in that first sentence of our revision was to establish the primary agents and define the conflict between them--to motivate the war that the text is about. We also needed to set the time and place, which is why we specified North America and 250 years ago. We decided on saying '250 years ago' instead of 'in 1763' because we wanted to convey how long it has been since these events took place. Students reading '1763' don't reliably make that connection; they don't translate a specific date into an actual span of time that has elapsed since."
Beck also describes the thinking behind the next sentence that she and McKeown constructed, which was, "This land was just west of where the 13 colonies were." She explains the two reasons for its composition: "First, it keeps the colonies active in the reader's mind, and the whole point of these four consecutive text segments is to present and motivate the players involved in the events that led to the American Revolution. Second, we wanted to prevent a common misconception that the French and Indian War was fought over ownership of the 13 colonies themselves. Placing the disputed land beyond the colonies accomplished that."
After all four text segments had been revised and the supplementary materials completed, Beck and McKeown conducted further studies. In these, they gave some students the revised text, some the background instruction, some both, and some neither. Students who received only one or the other--the revision or the supplementary background lesson--did better than students who received the original text alone. But the students who comprehended the text most fully received both the revised text and the background lesson--in other words, both the knowledge required to understand the text and a text that had been made coherent and clear.
These findings--that both knowledge and reading ability (or read-ability) are necessary for learning--not only support Perfetti's similar ones but also confirm Beck and McKeown's hypotheses about what knowledge students must have to reason with and what improvements make a troublesome text accessible. Beck and McKeown discussed their deep text analysis in a paper called "Learning from Social Studies Texts," published in the journal Cognition and Instruction. They have described their text revision process in a second paper, "Revising Social Studies Texts from a Text-Processing Perspective: Evidence of Improved Comprehensibility," which appeared in Reading Research Quarterly; and they have led a workshop on text revision for 13 teachers.
Responses to the work of these researchers has been enthusiastic. The text analysis paper has appealed widely to researchers, teachers, and text publishers. Beck believes the paper's value lies in its detail. "We take a section of text and we talk through the text. We say, What might a learner learn from this? How would a learner know that this inference needs to be made? It's very specific, very concrete."
McKeown adds, "I've heard some reports of teachers reading this paper and having that kind of recognition--'Oh, now I see why kids have trouble with this!' And I think that's because teachers know a lot about these things at a general level. Most, I think, would say that the social studies textbooks they use are not the greatest, that students have problems with them. What we have done, by making the problems explicit, is to help teachers elaborate on what they already know, to put meat around the bones of their understanding." Beck and McKeown believe that the rigorous process by which they see into generalizations about texts and learning has maximum value only when they describe that process as thoroughly as they pursue it, making their own work a fully comprehensible text for both the world of practice and the world of research.
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[Argument, Inference, and Learning]