Description:

Purpose: At the time of this project, 38 percent of U.S. 4th graders could not read and understand a paragraph in a children's book, and the percentages for struggling minority students and students from low-income families were even higher. In this project, the researchers aimed to use advances in cognitive science and the study of language development to create and pilot test an intervention to enhance young children's reading comprehension. They proposed a series of cognitive studies to build the underlying theory and help guide the development work. The researchers' goal was to develop a theoretically and empirically based approach to improving young children's comprehension.

Structured Abstract

THE FOLLOWING CONTENT DESCRIBES THE PROJECT AT THE TIME OF FUNDING

The intervention in this project is based on the Indexical Hypothesis. The Indexical Hypothesis theorizes that good readers associate words and phrases with objects and actions in the environment or mental images of objects and actions and use their ideas of these objects and images to make sense of what they are reading. The intervention is designed to teach children how to perform indexing, first with objects and then with mental images. Children read texts describing a toy scenario arrayed in front of them (a farm scenario with a barn, animals, tractor, etc.). After reading a sentence, they physically manipulate the toys to correspond to the sentence. Following this manipulation training, children then learn to imagine manipulating the objects. Namely, they would picture in their minds the objects and actions that a given sentence refers to. Training on the Indexical Hypothesis makes explicit that part of the reading process that requires the reader to link written words to what the words mean.

The researchers are carrying out four controlled experiments with random assignment to test the Indexical Hypothesis and demonstrate the intervention's efficacy with a culturally diverse sample of first and second grade students. In the first experiment the researchers are comparing students' ability to perform a manipulation task in which students imagined manipulating objects and whether performance depending on having been prepared for the task using physical manipulation of objects, seeing those objects without touching them, or having those objects described to them verbally. The second experiment is designed to determine whether being training to imagine manipulating objects increases students' ability to use their reading skills to carry out a practical task, such as following written instructions to build a particular object out of blocks. In the third experiment, the researchers are working with experimental classroom teachers to integrate imagining manipulating objects into their curricula for half a year and then comparing these students' reading comprehension skills with those of students in classrooms who continue to receive regular instruction. The fourth experiment involves following the progress of the children who participated in the third experiment for another half year to assess whether the intervention that leverages imagining manipulation of objects has enduring effects.

Products and Publications

ERIC Citations: Find available citations in ERIC for this award here.

Select Publications:

Book chapters

Glenberg, A.M. (2005). Lessons From the Embodiment of Language: Why Simulating Human Language Comprehension is Hard. In A. Cangelosi, G. Bugmann, and R. Borisyuk (Eds.), Lessons From the Embodiment of Language: Why Simulating Human Language Comprehension is Hard (pp. 17–30). River Edge, NJ: World Scientific Publishing, Co.

Glenberg, A.M. (2008). Toward the Integration of Bodily States, Language, and Action. In G.R. Semin, and E.R. Smith (Eds.), Embodied Grounding: Social, Cognitive, Affective, and Neuroscientific Approaches (pp. 43–70). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Glenberg, A.M., Jaworski, B., Rischal, M., and Levin, J.R. (2007). What Brains are For: Action, Meaning, and Reading Comprehension. In D. McNamara (Ed.), Reading Comprehension Strategies: Theories, Interventions, and Technologies (pp. 221–240). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Marley, S.C., and Levin, J.R. (2006). Pictorial Illustrations, Visual Imagery, and Motor Activity: Their Instructional Implications for Native American Children With Learning Disabilities. In R.J. Morris (Ed.), Disability Research and Policy: Current Perspectives (pp. 103–123). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Journal articles

Brown, M.C., McNeil, N.M., and Glenberg, A.M. (2009). Using Concreteness in Education: Real Problems, Potential Solutions. Child Development Perspectives, 3(3): 160–164.

Glenberg, A.M. (2006). Radical Changes in Cognitive Process due to Technology: A Jaundiced View. Pragmatics and Cognition, 14(2): 263–274.

Glenberg, A.M., Brown, M., and Levin, J.R. (2007). Enhancing Comprehension in Small Reading Groups Using a Manipulation Strategy. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 32(3): 389–399.

Glenberg, A.M., Gutierrez, T., Levin, J.R., Japuntich, S., and Kaschak, M.P. (2004). Activity and Imagined Activity can Enhance Young Children's Reading Comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96(3): 424–436.

Marley, S.C., Levin, J.R., and Glenberg, A.M. (2007). Improving Native American Children's Listening Comprehension Through Concrete Representations. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 32(3): 537–550.