Text Explicitness and Inferential Questioning: Effects on Story Understanding and Recall

THE INFERENCE load in three basal reader stories was reduced for third-grade readers by making the stories more explicit. One way the stories were made more explicit was by adding supportive information to the texts. Elaborations drawn from character relationship maps, scenario maps, and the goal structures of the stories were added to the texts. Components of summary events and explanations of concepts were also added. The second way the texts were elaborated was by asking inference questions at the ends of episodes to guide the children in orally making similar elaborations of the texts. The results indicated that adding large amounts of supportive information increased story understanding and enhanced interest in the stories, but had no effect on reading rate or the amount of important information included in story retellings. Making the stories more explicit by asking children inference questions produced similar results.