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Monitoring cognitive processes during reading: Is there converging evidence from fMRI studies of metacognitive cont

Monitoring cognitive processes during reading: Is there converging evidence from fMRI studies of metacognitive control?. Linda Baker Department of Psychology University of Maryland, Baltimore County Maryland Metacognition Seminar May 10, 2013.

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Monitoring cognitive processes during reading: Is there converging evidence from fMRI studies of metacognitive cont

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  1. Monitoring cognitive processes during reading: Is there converging evidence from fMRI studies of metacognitive control? Linda Baker Department of Psychology University of Maryland, Baltimore County Maryland Metacognition Seminar May 10, 2013

  2. “The vice of the poor reader is to say the words to himself without actively making judgments as to what they reveal.” • E. L. Thorndike, 1917

  3. Overview • Metacognition and comprehension monitoring: Definition and assessment • My early empirical research on comprehension monitoring • A new pursuit: Neuroscience connections • Work in progress: • Pilot results for fMRI cognitive monitoring tasks • Research plan

  4. Origins and impact • My research on metacognition had its roots in the 1970s work of cognitive developmental psychologists John Flavell and Ann Brown, whose interests in memory development led them to ask what children know about their memory and how they learn to control it. • Research on metacognition in relation to student achievement continues to be a significant area of inquiry around the world. • Evidence of popular appeal: A Google search for “metacognition and achievement” yielded 586,000 hits in April of 2013.

  5. Two Components of Metacognition • Knowledge: Knowledge about the skills, strategies, and resources that are needed to perform a task effectively • Control: the use of self-regulatory strategies to ensure successful task completion • Planning • Evaluating • Monitoring • Checking • Revising Baker & Brown,1984

  6. Interview Questions for Assessing Metacognitive Knowledge of Reading • Conceptions of good readers/good reading • What makes someone a really good reader? • If you know someone was having trouble reading, how would you help that person? • Strategies for dealing with comprehension difficulties • What do you do when you come to a word that you don’t know? • What do you do when you don’t understand something that you have read? • Strategies for studying/remembering • What do you do to help remember what you’ve read? • If you needed to study a chapter in your history book for a test, how would you do it? Meyers & Paris, 1978

  7. METACOGNITIVE AWARENESS OF READING STRATEGIES INVENTORY Directions: Listed below are statements about what people do when they read academic or school related materials such as textbooks or library books. After reading the statements circle the number that applies to you. Please note there are no right or wrong answers. • I think about what I know to help me understand what I read. (global reading strategy) • I summarize what I read to reflect on important information in the text. (support reading strategy) • I adjust my reading speed according to what I’m reading. (problem solving strategy) (Each item is rated on a 5-point scale with respect to how often the reader does the described activity.) (Mokhtari & Reichard, 2002)

  8. Comprehension Monitoring • Evaluation • Keeping track of the success or failure of one’s own ongoing efforts to understand • Regulation • Taking appropriate steps to deal with whatever difficulties arise

  9. Approaches to Assessing Comprehension Monitoring • Detection of errors in passages • Ratings of felt understanding • Self-corrections during oral reading • Real-time measures of processing • Eye movements, reading times, NEUROIMAGING??? • Verbal reports • Retrospective • Concurrent (thinking aloud)

  10. Please read: • The planet Jupiter is far from the sun. It is also the largest planet in our solar system. Jupiter circles the sun once every 12 years. Jupiter is a thousand times smaller than our planet. Jupiter has a giant red spot. The spot is the planet’s most famous feature. • Clouds form when warm and cold air meet. Clouds can bring rain, hail, sleet or snow to earth. Some people are paid to study the clouds. The clouds tell them what moultin we will have. There are many types of clouds. Each type means different weather is coming. • Long ago North America was covered with woodlands. Many early settlers lived in the woodlands. They collected nuts, berries, and fruits to eat. They used sand from the trees to make many things. They built houses, boats, and weapons. They even made medicine from the tree bark.

  11. Issues to Consider with Error-Detection Approaches • Readers may use fix-up strategies for resolving comprehensiondifficulties and so they think they understand. • Readers may identify problems other than those intended for them to find. • Whether or not a problem will be reported depends on several factors: • the readers’ goal for reading • the criteria they adopt for evaluating their understanding • their threshold for deciding when a problem is serious enough to report • personality characteristics (e.g., tolerance for ambiguity) Baker & Cerro, 2000

  12. Early Evidence that Comprehension Monitoring Can be Taught • Fourth grade students • More skilled readers • Less skilled readers • Three instructional conditions • Monitor understanding at a local level • Monitor understanding at a global level • No special instructions • Individual instruction on using local or global standards to evaluate comprehension • Assessed on use of standards while reading a longer passage immediately and two weeks later Baker & Zimlin, 1989

  13. Standards for Evaluating Comprehension: Microstructure (Local )Level • Lexical • Are there any words I don’t understand? • External consistency • Is there any information that doesn’t agree with what I already know? • Propositional cohesiveness • Are there any ideas that don’t fit together because I can’t tell who or what is being talked about?

  14. Standards for Evaluating Comprehension: Macrostructure (Global) Level • Structural cohesiveness • Are there any ideas that don’t fit together because I can’t tell how the ideas are related • Internal consistency • Are there any ideas that don’t fit together because I think the ideas are contradictory? • Informational completeness • Is there any information missing or not clearly explained?

  15. Mean Number of Problems Identified at Two Levels of Evaluation (maximum = 6)

  16. Metacognitively competent reading … “Throughout the reading of the text, good readers do much monitoring, are very aware of characteristics of the text (e.g., its difficulty; relevance to their reading goals; when the text is ambiguous; when the author is attempting to bias the reader; and, how the ideas in text relate to prior knowledge, for example, recognizing the ideas in the text as familiar to ones encountered before). The readers also monitor when they are having problems reading, for example, losing concentration or failing to understand terms in the text or get the meaning of the text. Such awareness of difficulties (or lack of them) can cause the reader to adjust reading, either speeding up or slowing down, or perhaps even seek other text to provide some background. “ Pressley & Gaskins, 2006

  17. Neuroscience Connections • Research to date has not examined neural correlates of comprehension monitoring, but related research on discourse processing and executive function suggests that neuroimaging studies will yield valuable information. • Executive function includes processes typically regarded as metacognitive in nature, such as planning, monitoring, and error correction and detection. • Fernandez-Duque, Baird, and Posner (2000) were among the first to suggest that activation in the brain in response to conflict monitoring (in the anterior cingulate) and conflict resolution (in the lateral prefrontal cortex) may reflect the metacognitive processes of cognitive monitoring and cognitive control.

  18. Relevant neuroimaging studies • fMRI and ERP are now being used to study neural correlates of higher-level processes related to comprehension, such as: • generating inferences while reading short narrative passages differing in complexity (Kuperberg et al., 2006; Prat, Mason, & Just, 2011) • detecting subtle and blatant violations of world knowledge in simple passages (Sanfordet al., 2011) • resolving referential ambiguities (Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2008)

  19. Basic Neuroimaging Findings • Discourse processing research has shown changes in brain functioning as readers attempt to make sense of the texts that they read, with involvement of both left and right hemispheres. For example, Kuperberget al. found greater activation in bilateral anterior inferior prefrontal gyri, the left middle frontal gyrus and bilateral medial prefrontal gyri for less coherent passages. • Afew correlational studies have indicated that the brains of skilled readers respond more efficiently to tasks that challenge comprehension (e.g., Prat & Just). • Much of this research has been undertaken by cognitive psychologists who do not frame their work in an educational or metacognitive context and who do not consider the implications for intervention. • Those neuroimaging studies that do have an explicit focus on metacognition tend to address memory of discrete items rather than text comprehension (Shimamura, 2008).

  20. Cognitive Monitoring and Reading: An fMRI Study of Individual Differences • Purpose: • to determine whether systematic differences in brain functioning are apparent when adult readers encounter texts that demand monitoring of their ongoing comprehension processes • to examine individual differences in brain activation patterns in relation to reading skills and self-regulated learning strategies (including metacognitive strategies and motivation). Collaborators: Nicole Else-Quest, UMBC MalleTagamets, MPRC

  21. Pilot Study of the Cognitive Monitoring Tasks to be Used in the Scanner • Participants: • 22 UMBC undergraduates • Each completed two tasks: • Think-aloud while rating the comprehensibility of one set of materials • Computer presentation: response times to evaluate comprehensibility of a second set of materials • Instructions: • Specified that materials had been deliberately modified by the research team to contain content that should make the passages harder to understand • Materials • Task A • Task B

  22. Task A • Zack took a test in school. He did not know the material. He scored the highest in the class. • Zack took a test in school. He did not take good notes. He scored the highest in the class. • Zack took a test in school. He studied hard for the exam. He scored the highest in the class.

  23. Task B • The class took a field trip to the fair. The teacher bought tickets for the rides. •  The class took a field trip to the fair. The teacher bought foodfor the rides. • The class took a field trip to the fair. The teacher bought drugsfor the rides. • The class took a field trip to the fair. The teacher bought whibbles for the rides.

  24. Pilot Study Materials • Task A: Internal consistency • 60 3-sentence passages, some of which contain inconsistencies that are easily resolvable or not • Three separate lists, counterbalanced across problem types • Task B: External consistency • 80 2-sentence passages, some of which contain subtle or blatant violations of prior knowledge or lexical knowledge • Four separate lists, counterbalanced across problem types

  25. Computer Presentation Format for Internal Consistency task Zack took a test in school. He did not know the material. He scored the highest in the class. ?

  26. Computer Presentation Format for External Consistency Task The class took a field trip to the fair. The teacher bought ______ for the rides. drugs

  27. Pilot Data for Internal Consistency Task

  28. Pilot Data for External Consistency Task

  29. Cognitive Monitoring and Reading: An fMRI Study of Individual Differences Three phases: • experience the fMRI simulator • complete a series of laboratory-based tasks and assessments • complete two cognitive monitoring tasks in the fMRI scanner along with control tasks for baseline information

  30. Participants • 36 UMBC undergraduate students • 18 men and 18 women • Selection criteria: • Inclusion: right-handed, native mono-lingual speaker of English. • Exclusion: no first degree family member with a psychiatric disorder, no contraindications for fMRI

  31. Measures • Individual Difference Assessments (lab) • Reading Ability (comprehension and vocabulary) • Working Memory • Fluency • Self-Regulated Learning • metacognitive and cognitive strategies, motivation • Epistemic Beliefs • Cognitive Monitoring Assessments (fMRI) • Internal Consistency • External Consistency

  32. Measures: Reading Ability • The Nelson-Denny Reading Test is a standardized norm-referenced test of reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge • The reading comprehension test consists of 7 informational passages with 38 multiple-choice comprehension questions. • The vocabulary test consists of 80 items; the examinee selects which of 6 words is the best definition of the target item. Brown, Fishco, & Hanna, 1993

  33. Measures: Working Memory • The Reading Span test assesses working memory by requiring participants to read sentences, verify their truth value, and remember a word presented immediately after reading and responding to the sentence. • An example sentence is “Mr. Jones left the lawnmower in the lemon,” to which the participant should respond “incorrect”; the word EAGLE is then presented, followed by the next sentence in the set. • After all of the sentences in a given set have been presented, the participant is asked to recall the target words in order. Set sizes range from three to seven. (Bailey, 2012)

  34. Measures: Fluency • The Reading Fluency subtest of the norm-referenced Woodcock Johnson III Tests of Achievement (WJ III) gives examinees 3 minutes to read and verify the plausibility of as many sentences as possible • The Math Fluency subtest of the WJ III gives examinees 3 minutes to solve as many single-digit math calculation problems as possible Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001

  35. Measures: Self-Regulated Learning • The Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (LASSI)is a norm-referenced assessment of students' awareness about and use of learning and study strategies. • 10 scales: attitude, motivation, time management, anxiety, concentration, information processing, selecting main ideas, study aids, self-testing, and test strategies. • Participants indicate on a 5-point scale the extent to which each described thought or activity is typical of themselves. An example Item on the self-testing (metacognitive) scale is, “I stop periodically while reading and mentally go over or review what was said.” Weinstein et al., 2001

  36. Measures: Epistemic Beliefs • The Epistemological Beliefs Inventorytaps students’ beliefs about the nature of knowledge and the nature of learning. • Five subscales: • Certain knowledge, innate ability, quick learning, simple knowledge, and omniscient authority • Participants rate on a 6-point scale the degree to which they agree with each assertion. An example statement on the certain knowledge scale is, “There are certain truths in life that won’t ever change.” Bendixen, Schraw, & Dunkel, 1998

  37. Measures: Cognitive Monitoring • Internal Consistency Task • Participants evaluate whether each passage is clear and consistent • External Consistency Task • Participants verify whether each target word is a good sentence completion • Order of tasks is counterbalanced, organized into blocks and runs in the scanner, with periods of rest and a continuous performance task.

  38. Analyses • SPM software will be used to analyze the imaging data. Patterns of activation will be contrasted across the different conditions within each task. • Changes in brain activity will be analyzed in conjunction with the behavioral data (response times and accuracy). • Voxelwise analyses will reveal the distribution of activation during cognitive monitoring in relation to reading skills and self-reported use of cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies.

  39. Expected Findings • Both left and right hemispheres will be involved in evaluating coherence, consistent with other studies of discourse processing. • The right temporal cortex and the right inferior prefrontal cortex in particular may show stronger hemodynamic responses for the inconsistent passages. • Better readers will show less brain activation while monitoring their comprehension than poorer readers, with evidence for some compensatory processing taking place in the right hemispheres of those whose reading processes are less efficient(in terms of reading fluency, reading memory span).

  40. Longer-Term Goals • To examine developmental changes in brain activity among adolescents and young adults as they engage in tasks requiring cognitive monitoring. Age-related differences in comprehension monitoring are apparent at the high school level. Increases in executive functioning that are seen at this time are often attributed to maturation of the pre-frontal cortex. • To determine whether training in comprehension monitoring and self-regulated learning strategies increases efficiency of neural functioning. A recent study involving mathematical problem solving provides reason to expect such an effect (Shroeder, 2012).

  41. With thanks to … My UMBC undergraduate research assistants on the fMRI project: • IffathFarzano • NarcisseFon • Allyson Nedzbala • Alicia Serrato • Jonathan Shonk • KeerthiYarlagadda

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