The Effects of General and Specific Self-Instruction Training on Children's Comprehension Monitoring Performances during Reading

Abstract

tary school aged children's comprehension monitoring during reading. Forty-four fourthgrade average readers were given either general self-instruction, task-specific self-instruction, task-specific didactic instruction or control practice training for detecting inconsistencies in text. Immediately after training, both self-instructional procedures proved effective for enhancing children's error detection ability relative to the control procedure and the general self-instruction promoted greater performances than didactic instruction. After 3 weeks, the self-instructional students retained their performance superiority over the control students and both self-instructional procedures elicited greater performances than equivalent teacher-directed instruction. The general self-instructions increased students' tendency to monitor a wider range of conceptual information than the task-specific self-instructions. The discussion centers on the centrality of the self-verbalization component of training, issues of generalizability and directions for future research on self-instructional training during reading remediation.