The role of reading comprehension in children's ability to locate information in text

Previous research has suggested that the cognitive process of reading comprehension is separate and distinct from the process of searching for information in documents, but evidence for this distinction is not strong. The present study tested the hypothesis that reading comprehension does play a role in search, but only when the task requires the reader to integrate pieces of information or understand a complex document. Sixty Grade 8 students were assessed on two dimensions: reading comprehension and word decoding. They were then given a series of search tasks that varied in level of difficulty, from searching for a single point of information in a simple document, to integrating pieces of information in a complex document. It was found that all students were relatively good at locating the correct answers to simple and intermediate search questions, regardless of their decoding abilities, but good comprehension skills were necessary to complete the complex task successfully. Furthermore, it appears that better decoding skills were associated with faster search on the simple and intermediate tasks. Verbal reports given by the students after they completed selected search tasks indicated that readers with high scores on both of the reading measures planned their search more often than readers with low scores on both measures. The implications of these findings for designing text search programs were discussed.