Children's Recall of Familiar and Unfamiliar Text

THIS STUDY examined the relationship between comprehension ability and prior knowledge in children's recall of structurally equivalent text. Fourth-grade students answered explicit textbased prequestions and then read six passages on familiar and unfamiliar topics. They then recalled and answered probe questions about the passages. Retelling elicited text-based responses whereas probing encouraged more responses based on prior knowledge. Topic familiarity was a relative concept; consequently, prior knowledge was used to predict subsequent comprehension performmance. Both comprehension ability and prior knowledge served as predictors of comprehension performance. However, general prior knowledge of the topics was the strongest predictor of the student's ability to draw inferences and elaborate. Students also exhibited the use of analogical knowledge to comprehend related passages. Overall, these results support recent research and current theories of the comprehension process.