BDA International Conference 2016

Title:Exploring the Role of Knowledge Transfer on Passage Comprehension in Children withLearning Differences: An Exploratory Study.Abstract: There is overwhelming evidence supporting the primary role of background knowledgein facilitating the construction of a coherent situation model during reading (McNamara &Kintsch, 1996; Rawson & Van Overschelde, 2008). The situation model involves the intertwiningof the reader’s background knowledge with the text-based representation to form a deeprepresentation of the text. Thus, the situation model is a more meaningful representation thatgoes beyond the text-based information (Kintsch, 1988), is cumulative, and evolves as oneprogresses through the text. The resulting situation model represents a rich elaborated structureof events, actions, objects, and people involved in the text organized in a manner consistentwith the reader’s knowledge. This has prompted us to conceptualize reading comprehensionas the accumulation of knowledge across time and more specifically across texts, through bothreading and listening. We assume the buildup of knowledge occurs as children encounter newinformation in text that is then integrated within their existing knowledge structures. Thus,connecting new knowledge into existing knowledge structures would seem to be critical inacquiring knowledge across time and learning opportunities. However, little work has beendone examining how and when children draw upon their existing background knowledge tounderstand new information encountered in text. Additionally, the cognitive processes thatcontribute to individual differences in the application of reader knowledge to new situations/information in text have not been investigated.The AIM Academy Clubs offer a natural experiment to examine how existing knowledgestructures affect the comprehension of new information in text along with the cognitiveprocesses that facilitate the linking of existing reader knowledge with new informationencountered in text. In this presentation I will present initial results from an experimentalmeasurement study examining the relation between domain knowledge and passagecomprehension among fifth grade students enrolled at Aim Academy, ConshohockenPennsylvania. We were interested in whether students would leverage content learned in clubto learn analogous topics outside of club more easily. Furthermore, we’re interested in thecognitive processes that enable students to transfer and build knowledge within and acrossdomains