Kintsch Examples

8/13/2019 Kintsch Examples

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Copyright 2005, 2010 by Walter Kintsch 2

than nodes that have few links, resulting in a characteristic recall pattern, where important (i.e.,

richly interconnected) propositions are recalled much more frequently than unimportant detail.

Situation ModelThe situation model is the third level of representation that is important here. While the textbase

represents the meaning and organization of the text, the situation model can go far beyond thetext itself. It is the readers understanding in terms of his or her own goals, interests, and prior

knowledge. Most importantly, it integrates the new text and what the reader knew before by

creating links between. The surface representation is a linguistic structure; the textbase is asymbolic, verbal structure; the situation model can be more general, including symbolic, verbal

elements and imagery of various kinds, as well as emotional elements. The situation model,

because of its strong links to prior knowledge, experience, interests, and goals, becomes part ofthe readers knowledge base and can therefore be retrieved when needed in novel contexts. Thus,

to turn what a reader has read into useful knowledge, a good, well-integrated situation model

must be constructed.

Example: Levels of Representation in the Mental Representation of aTextA brief example will make more concrete the notion of multiple mental representations. The

example is more fully discussed in Kintsch (2004). It is a story written for 5th graders with

embedded science materials. That is, the story is there to keep the students interested, but the real

interest of the author is teaching them some basic facts about electricity. The story has foursections, the first comprising the setting, the second a complication, the third focusing on the

embedded science material, and the last section providing a resolution. That, is, it follows a

simple story schema, with one inclusion.We distinguish three levels of representation: the surface representation (memory), the

textbase, and the situation model.

Surface Representation (Example)Surface memory allows the verbatim reproduction of portions of the text. The textbase consistsof two components, the microstructure and the macrostructure. The microstructure consists of a

network of propositions (corresponding to idea units) that represent the meaning of the sentences

of the text, as well as their interrelationships. An example is shown in Table 1 where onesentence from the text is analyzed into its two constituent propositions and a connective linking

those propositions.

Textbase (Example)The generation of the textbase requires linguistic knowledge (semantic, syntactic) but also

general world knowledge (the causal relation between BUY and BILL in Table 1). Thepropositions of the microstructure are linked, sometimes explicitly (as by the WHILE),sometimes implicitly. Implicit links may be based upon repetition (e.g., the next sentence refers

to Katie with she, requiring the reader to identify the pronoun with its referent), or through

causal connections (e.g., Father paid the billwhich is a consequence of Katies purchase).Thus, the microstructure is a complex network of linked propositional nodes. Some of these

nodes make up the gist of the story, i.e., they belong to its macrostructure. In general, themacrostructure requires readers to infer nodes that are not explicitly stated in the text but are


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Table 1

In town, her father filled the Model T's gas tank, while Katie bought a sewing machine belt and browsed

in the general store

C1 P1

P2

P3

[IN, TOWN, P2]

[FILL, FATHER, GAS-TANK]

[HAS-PART, MODEL-T, GAS-TANK]

P4 [WHILE, P2, P5, P7]C2 P5

P6

P7

[BUY, KATIE, BELT]

[HAS-PART, SEWING-MACHINE, BELT]

[BROWSE, KATIE, GENERAL-STORE]

generalizations or constructions based upon the text. For instance, in the present example, themacroproposition expressing the gist of the second setting section of the story is Electricity

comes to the farmwhich is never stated in the story, but is the gist of its introductory section.

Situation Model (Example)The situation model for our story will have two aspectsthe story and the science content. The

students reading goal is to learn about electricity. The story is merely there to keep the studentsinterest up by making the information about electricity we want the student to learn the key for

solving a puzzle around which the story is constructed. Table 2 shows the facts a successful

reader will include in her situation model and link to whatever he or she already knows aboutelectricity.

Table 2

Prior KnowledgeInformation Provided by the Text(Links to Prior Knowledge Printed in Red)

Electricity needswires

You have to bring

wood in for the stove Electricity is neededfor lamps, ironing,sewing machines,and telephones

Electricity comes to you via wires (you dont have to get it like wood toburn in the stove);

Electricity is generated from coal or water;

Static electricity produces sparks and lightening; Electric current is a form of energy (like water power) Electric energy is used to

make light (by heating up filament in bulb)make heat (like for ironing)make motion (like a sewing machine, or record player)talk on the telephone (needs extra wire; invented by Bell)

Textbases usually mirror faithfully (though often incompletely) the actual text. Situation

models, however, are much less predictable, because they can vary widely according to the goals

and interests and the background knowledge of the reader. Most readers share the linguistic andgeneral world knowledge required to generate the textbase (they know that she is marked for

gender and hence refers to Katie rather than father, or that a purchase is a common cause for abill); but the specialized knowledge required for the construction of the situation model is morelikely to vary among readerssome might not know that electricity needs wires (as I assumed in

the example above), or that telephones need electricity. Furthermore, some readers may know

these facts, if you specifically query them, but when reading that knowledge is not retrieved and

hence the new information about electricity is not, or incompletely, linked to prior knowledge.This is a major problem for learning from text, because if that linkage is not made, the new


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information acquired from the text remains inert, and cannot be retrieved and used on later

occasions when these facts about electricity become relevant.

2. How Mental Representations of a Text Are FormedMost fluent adult readers, most of the time, perform as experts: we read material that presents no

particular difficulty (newspapers, novels, in domains with which we are highly familiar [researchpapers in psychology or education that are directly related to our work]), in non-stressful

environments. What characterizes expertise is that performance has become largely automatic.

The expert professional does not have to try specifically to form a good situation model for theresearch paper he is reading; the physician with decades of experience does not have to try to

arrive at a diagnosis in routine casesboth arise quite automatically. Simon (1980) has arguedthat true expertise requires about 10 years of practice. Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Rmer

(1993) have shown that practice requires proper guidance. To become an expert skier it is not

sufficient just to ski a lot; you need someone to guide your practice, make you work on just theright things that will make possible long-term progress. We recently observed that just having

6th grade students write a lot of summaries of texts they had read does not make them better

summary writers. Indeed, it may just ingrain bad habits. They need someone or something thattells them what about their writing was good and what was not goodonly with such feedbackto guide them does practice make perfect.

What happens when adult fluent readers read texts that are difficult and outside of their

domain of expertise? That is in fact the situation college students are in when they are trying tolearn from reading texts. Instructional texts are by intent outside the students domain of

expertisetheir goal is to let the student become an expert, to teach something new.

Comprehensionat the level of constructing a situation modelis no longer automatic in thatcase. Instead, strategic processes are required to compensate. Reading is no longer easy, but

requires effort, concentration, and resources. Everyday observation confirms the results of

laboratory experiments (e.g., McNamara, Kintsch, Songer, & Kintsch, 1996) that, in general,

students do not like to expend that necessary effort for learning, and are all too easily satisfiedwith superficial understanding. Instructional texts are usually well written and well organized, so

it is easy to form a good textbase, including a macrostructure that would allow the reproduction

of the gist of the text on a test. But such comprehension remains inadequate for learning: nosituation model is generated, it is not linked appropriately with prior knowledge. In consequence,

the textual information remains a relatively isolated memory episode that can be recalled given

the right retrieval cues, but that has not become integrated with the readers memory, and henceis not readily available on future occasions where it would be needed. It remains inert

knowledge, rather than becoming a part of the readers knowledge base.

There are many tricks that have been developed to prod such readers into doing the hardwork of forming a situation model, rather than being satisfied with superficial understanding. In

fact, constructivism is build around the idea that readers must construct their own mentalrepresentation (situation model) which is an effortful, resource demanding, strategic process.

McNamara et al. (1996) have intentionally made texts harder to read and less well organized inan effort to force the reader to work harder and forestall superficial comprehension. The

technique worked very well with readers that were adequately prepared for the text, but failed

badly when readers did not have the right kind of background knowledge and hence simplycould not perform the kind of constructive activity that was demanded. Another technique that

has been successfully used in earlier grades is Questioning the Author (Beck, McKeown,


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Worthy, Sandora, & Kucan, 1996) which guides readers to ask the kind of questions about a text

that are required for deep understanding. Kintsch (1998, Chapter 9) provides a more detaileddiscussion of these issues. A crucial point to remember is that deep understanding must be

properly assessedif we just ask students to regurgitate a text, we are not getting at what they

really did understand. To summarize: comprehension in the expert reader is a smooth, automatic

process; students are nonexperts by definition and must use compensatory strategies to arrive atdeep understanding; these strategies are hard, and not engaged naturally.

3. Comprehension in the 4th and 5th GradeFourth grade readers are not experts. Hence what was said above about college students learning

from texts also applies to them. In addition, we cannot assume that textbase formation is as easyand uncomplicated for them as for college students. Decoding and linguistic analysis are not

fully automated yet. Thus, decoding will still have to be taught at these levels, at least for some

students. A question arises whether the most successful methods for doing so in grade 4 and 5are the same as in the first grades, or whether there are better methods that take into account the

age differences.

It appears that young children rely more on surface representations than on higher-levelrepresentations. Brainerd and Reyna (1992) distinguish between verbatim traces and fuzzy tracesthat represent gist information (a mixture of textbase and situation model in the present

terminology, with emphasis of the macrostructure of the text). They find an initial reliance on

verbatim memory in childrens recall of texts and an increasing preference for fuzzy traceprocessing with age. This age related shift to fuzzy-trace processing may simply reflect an early

preference for verbatim processing, or a gradual maturing of the competencies required for

textbase and situation model construction (Brainerd & Reyna, 1993). Schnpflug (2005) hasshown that in 8- and 9-year-old children the relative importance of verbatim versus high-level

processing can be manipulated by instructions. Thus, it seems that one of the tasks in 4th and 5th

grade would be to facilitate the shift from verbatim processing to higher-level processing. Gist

processing can be practiced by summarization tasks (e.g., Brown, Bransford, Ferrara, &Campione, 1983; Brown & Day, 1983; Brown, Day, & Jones, 1983; Wade-Stein & Kintsch,

2004). Again, we should emphasize that just asking children to summarize is not enough: they

must receive guidance about what they did, where they need improvement, and what they didright.

Explicit training in forming situation models would also be useful at this level. There is

solid evidence that children at this age do form good situation model from readingif they havethe necessary knowledge background. For example Schneider, Krkel, and Weinert (1989) found

that young soccer experts outperformed fluent adult readers who were not soccer experts (the

study was done in Europe) as well as non-expert classmates when given a description of a soccermatch on questions that required deep understanding. Indeed, domain knowledge (and the

interest in the subject matter that goes with it) compensates for lack of reading ability (Schneideret al., 1989; Walker, 1987). It would seem worthwhile to investigate how instruction can take

advantage of these results. Students have to be shown that reading is for deep understanding, notfor rote memory.

ConclusionMy main goal here was to describe the target: adult fluent reading comprehension, with its

complex, multilevel mental representations and reliance on automatic processes. I then tried to


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contrast this with the problems faced by students in grades 4 and 5. Pedagogical implications can

be derived from this argument. I realize that they are much too vague at this point, but hope thismay be a starting point for thinking about what standards should be.

References

Beck, I.L., McKeown, M.G., Worthy, J., Sandora, C., & Kucan, L. (1996). Questioning the

author: A yearlong classroom implementation to engage students with text. TheElementary School Journal, 96, 385414. doi:10.1086/461835

Brainerd, C.J., & Reyna, V.F. (1992). Explaining memory free reasoning. Psychological

Science, 3(6), 332339. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.1992.tb00042.x

Brainerd, C.J., & Reyna, V.F. (1993). Memory independence and memory interference incognitive development. Psychological Review, 100(1), 4267. doi:10.1037/0033-

295X.100.1.42

Brown, A.L., Bransford, J.D., Ferrara, R.A., & Campione, J.C. (1983). Learning, remembering,

and understanding. In J. Flavell & E.M. Markman (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology:

Vol. 3 Cognitive development(4th ed., pp. 515629). New York: Wiley.

Brown, A.L., & Day, J.D. (1983). Macrorules for summarizing texts: The development of

expertise.Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 22, 114.doi:10.1016/S0022-5371(83)80002-4

Brown, A.L., Day, J.D., & Jones, R.S. (1983). The development of plans for summarizing texts.Child Development, 54, 968979. doi:10.2307/1129901

Ericsson, K.A., Krampe, R.T., & Tesch-Rmer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the

acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363406.

doi:10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363

Kintsch, W. (1998). Comprehension: A comprehension paradigm for cognition. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Kintsch, W. (2004). The construction-integration model of text comprehension and itsimplications for instruction. In R. Ruddell & N. Unrau (Eds.), Theoretical models and

processes of reading(5th ed., pp. 12701328). Newark, DE: International Reading

Association.Kintsch, W., & van Dijk, T.A. (1978). Towards a model of text comprehension and production.

Psychological Review, 85(5), 363394. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.85.5.363

McNamara, D.S., Kintsch, E., Songer, N.B., & Kinstch, W. (1996). Are good texts alwaysbetter? Text coherence, background knowledge, and levels of understanding in learning

from text. Cognition and Instruction, 14(1), 143. doi:10.1207/s1532690xci1401_1

Schneider, W., Krkel, J., & Weinert, F.E. (1989). Domain-specific knowledge and memoryperformance: A comparison of high- and low-aptitude children.Journal of Educational

Psychology, 81(3), 306312. doi:10.1037/0022-0663.81.3.306

Schnpflug, U. (2005). Wrtliches und inhaltliches Erinnern gehrter Erzhlungen bei Kindern.

In K.P. Dahle & R. Volbe (Eds.),Entwicklungspsychologische Aspekte derRechtspsychologie(pp. 271278). Gttingen: Hogrefe.

Wade-Stein, D., & Kintsch, E. (2004). Summary street: Interactive computer support for writing.Cognition and Instruction, 22(3), 333362. doi:10.1207/s1532690xci2203_3

Walker, C.H. (1987). Relative importance of domain knowledge and overall aptitude on

acquisition of domain-related knowledge. Cognition and Instruction, 4(1), 2542.

doi:10.1207/s1532690xci0401_2

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