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The Multi-layered Reading Goals of Expert Readers:
Bridging Between Knowledge, Interest, and Strategy Use
Emily Fox
Liliana Maggioni
Daniel L. Dinsmore
Patricia A. Alexander
University of Maryland
Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association,
March, 2008, New York
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Abstract
Expert readers’ pursuit of multi-layered reading goals was examined within the framework of
Alexander’s Model of Domain Learning (MDL). Seven experts in the field of reading completed
knowledge pre-tests, think-aloud protocols using both reading and history passages, and openended outcome questions. The think-aloud protocols were coded for strategic and
evaluative/monitoring behaviors in addition to evidence of reading goals. Evidence supported the
experts’ pursuit of multi-layered reading goals, as they evaluated the text and their understanding
of it on multiple levels. Higher-level goals differed for the reading and history passages, and
were also associated with specific knowledge for the topic of the reading passage.
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The Multi-layered Reading Goals of Expert Readers: Bridging Between Knowledge, Interest,
and Strategy Use
Alexander’s Model of Domain Learning (MDL) provides a characterization of the
trajectory followed by learners on the path to expertise in academic domains in terms of
distinctive profiles for knowledge, interest, and strategy use at different stages of development
(Alexander, 1997, 1998, 2002). In particular, experts are expected to have breadth and depth of
knowledge in their domain of expertise, to be driven primarily by individual interest in domainrelated activities and materials, and to use deep-level processing strategies as they learn. Such a
multidimensional developmental characterization implies that knowledge, interest, and strategy
use are bound up together in shaping our understanding of both the learner’s progress over time
in a domain and also the nature of the learner’s activity in a given learning situation at a specific
point in their developmental trajectory. How might knowledge, interest, and strategy use interact
for the learner in a given learning situation? In this study, we will investigate the interaction of
knowledge, interest, and strategy use for expert readers in terms of their pursuit of multi-layered
reading goals.
Theoretical Framework
Readers actively construct their understanding of the text as they read (RAND Reading
Study Group, 2002). As they read, they monitor their progress toward a desired level of
understanding, typically by reference to some standard of coherence (Pressley & Afflerbach,
1995; Tapiero, 2007). Because reading is a complex and multi-layered task, readers must
monitor their understanding on multiple levels. In order to build a connected understanding, the
reader has to understand at the level of words, phrases, propositions, and paragraphs, as well as
at the level of an entire argument or an entire passage. These local and global levels of
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understanding make up a hierarchy of tasks and related goals. Beyond an understanding of the
text, readers may also evaluate the text in a number of ways, including its qualities as a piece of
writing, its credibility, fairness or balance, and for its accuracy in relation to what they may
already know concerning the topic or in relation to other texts (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995;
Scaradamalia & Bereiter, 1991). Yet another set of possible tasks and goals for the reader would
be the development of such evaluations (Fox, Maggioni, & Riconscente, 2005).
Pursuit of these reading goals typically requires activation of knowledge, metacognitive
awareness, and strategic processing. However, goals at different levels are likely to require
different levels of effort from the reader, as well as variable reliance on domain-specific or
domain-general knowledge and strategies. Thus, we would expect that higher-level goals would
be more likely to be pursued by readers at a higher level of experience or expertise. This
understanding of goals as guiding self-regulatory activities on multiple levels during learning and
as reflecting the learners’ level of expertise in terms of their task definition is in line with the
relevant literatures on both self-regulated learning (e.g., Pintrich, 2000) and expertise (e.g.,
Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1991). The specific framework used here, the MDL, offers an account
of how learners’ varying levels of knowledge, interest, and strategy use are related to their level
of development in an academic domain (Alexander, 1997, 1998, 2002). Looking specifically at
the reading goals pursued by readers provides a way to illuminate the interaction of knowledge,
interest, and strategy use in a particular learning situation for individuals at a given point in
expertise development. In particular, we would expect that the learner’s levels of knowledge and
interest related to the text would drive their selection of higher-level reading goals and their level
of effort in interacting with the text, and would require them to use the appropriate type of
strategic processing necessary to achieve those goals. Reading goals are thus an indicator of the
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reader’s level of engagement and act as a bridge between readers’ knowledge and interest and
their strategic processing.
Knowledge in the MDL has two aspects, with both breadth of domain knowledge and
depth of topic knowledge increasing across the stages of development. The broadness of domain
knowledge refers to coverage of topics relevant to a given domain, while depth of topic
knowledge concerns the extent of learners’ familiarity with specific domain-related topics and
the principled nature of that knowledge. Interest in this model can take the form of either
situational or more temporal interest and individual or long-term interest in a particular domain.
An individual interest in a subject-matter, by definition, implies the desire to learn more about it.
Readers are therefore expected to be more highly engaged in reading about a content area in
which they have an individual interest. In early stages of learning, situational interest plays more
of a role, while the influence of individual interest is low. These roles are reversed for an expert
learner in the domain.
Strategy use also displays dual aspects for learning in the MDL. In the early stages of
learning, surface-level strategies (e.g., rereading the text or ascertaining word meanings) play the
predominant role and the learning outcome is comprehension and limited recall. For expert
learners, deep-processing strategies (e.g., relating current text to other readings) become the
focus, while surface-processing strategies may be less often required. Such a distinction between
deep and surface levels of processing has also been drawn by researchers investigating
approaches to learning from text (Marton & Säljö, 1976, 2005), where a surface learning
approach focuses on retention and replication of the text itself, while a deep learning approach
looks beyond the text and attends more to the author’s intention and what the text is trying to
say, its meaning. The processing of readers with a surface learning approach tends to be
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atomistic and local, while that of readers with a deep learning approach is more holistic and
global (Marton & Säljö, 2005). In terms of Kintsch’s Construction-Integration model of
comprehension (1998), surface-level processing assists the reader in constructing a coherent
textbase (propositional representation of the text’s content), while the more expert deepprocessing strategies pull the reader into deeper interaction with the text in developing a situation
model (integrated representation of the reader’s understanding of the meaning of the text).
Expert reading involves moving beyond just constructing a coherent textbase to
developing an integrated situation model, for difficult domain-related texts (Scardamalia &
Bereiter, 1991). Skilled readers can develop coherent textbases easily and automatically–it may
not demand much engagement with the text, depending on its level of difficulty and their level of
knowledge, and can result in effective recall. To go beyond that and develop an integrated
situation model means asking what the text means, forming an interpretation and integrating it
with prior knowledge and experience. A further level of reading expertise might be to create a
coherent textbase, an integrated situation model, and also position yourself to question whether
you agree with what the author is saying and how it is being said (Fox et al., 2005; Scardamalia
& Bereiter, 1991). Expert readers are therefore likely to be pursuing multiple levels of reading
goals when they are reading in the area of their expertise. Experts’ learning outcomes can thus
include substantial recall, as well as critical evaluations, cross-text comparisons, and welldeveloped interpretations
Specifically, in this study we are interested in whether we see experts engaging in
processing behaviors as they read that indicate that they are pursuing goals related to the most
basic level of processing, or remembering the text. Beyond that, we would expect that they might
be trying to understand the text content, to understand the argument presented in the text, and to
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understand how the argument is situated in the context of its associated domain discourse. And
beyond that, we would expect that they might be working on evaluating the text content, the
content of the argument, and the argument as it is positioned in the relevant domain discourse.
Finally, we would also expect that they might be evaluating the quality of the text as well as the
quality of the argument it presents. Although we would hypothesize that readers are pursuing
these multiple goals simultaneously, rather than taking them up in turn, typically only one would
be expected to be at forefront of consciousness and thus revealed through think-aloud
verbalizations. In addition, we recognize that the text-related goals we have identified do not
exhaust the possible range of goals readers could be engaged in pursuing in the complex
interaction of reader, text, and task that is reading (RAND, 2002).
In this study, we investigated the reading of seven expert readers within the domain of
reading. We looked at the types of on-line reading goals they pursued as they processed a
reading text pertinent to their area of expertise, and also for a history text outside their expertise.
We expected to see them pursuing multiple levels of goals in the course of their reading, and to
see a clear difference in the types of goals they established for themselves for these two texts.
We also expected to see some degree of variation among the experts in their level of interest and
knowledge of the specific topic of the reading text, and to see a corresponding divergence in the
nature of their engagement in terms of goal-directed efforts for that text.
Methods
Participants
Our participants were seven experts in the field of reading, all associated with the same
university, a large research institution in the Mid-Atlantic region. Participants were recruited via
e-mail request by the first author. One invited participant (a full professor) declined. Of the seven
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who agreed to participate, five were faculty members (three full professors, one associate
professor, and one assistant professor), one was a recent PhD recipient, and one was a doctoral
student with many years of experience as a reading specialist. Five were females, and two males.
All identified themselves as of European-American background. Their ages ranged from 30 to
63, and the years they had received their PhD ranged from 2005 to 1968 (with one who had not
yet received her PhD.) Table 1 presents our participants’ demographic data. Data were collected
in the summer and early fall of 2005.
Measures
Demographics. Participants completed a demographics questionnaire giving background
information on gender, ethnicity, age, current educational level, year they received their PhD,
and area of specialization.
Interest. A 20-item interest rating questionnaire assessed interest in the academic
domains of science, reading, history, and art. Responses were on a 1 to 5 scale, where 1 was
“Strongly Agree” and 5 was “Strongly Disagree.” A sample item for history was, “History is
personally important to me.” There were five items for each academic domain, and items were
parallel in construction. Two items for each domain were negatively phrased and reverse coded.
Reliability was relatively poor, with α = .552; this may have been partially due both to the small
sample and to the lack of variability in responses to the reading items, where our participants
were uniformly high. Interest was further assessed by a 30-item activities questionnaire asking
about participants’ frequency of participation in history-related general and professional
activities (15 items) and in a parallel set of reading-related general and professional activities (15
items). Responses were on a 1 to 5 scale, where 1 was “Rarely/Never” and 5 was “About Daily.”
A sample item for general history-related activities read, “[How often do you:] Visit history
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museums or exhibits.” A sample item for professional reading-related activities read, ““[How
often do you:] Read scholarly journals related to reading.” Reliabilities for both activity-based
interest subscales were strong, with α = .830 for reading and α = .916 for history. Mean scores
for both knowledge and interest appear in Table 2.
. Knowledge. Participants completed four knowledge measures assessing the breadth of
their domain knowledge and depth of their topic knowledge in reading and in history. The
knowledge measures were validated by a history and a reading expert for appropriateness of
domain and topic representation and accuracy of answer choices. These knowledge measures
were originally designed for a broader cross-sectional study including domain experts and
younger participants as well (as were the interest measures described above), and were intended
to span a wide range of possible levels of knowledge. They should thus be interpreted with
caution as far as how well they discriminate between participants like those in this study, who
are similar in level of expertise. The domain knowledge measures were 20-item multiple choice
assessments in which participants were asked to choose the response that best completed the
given analogy. A graduated response scoring scheme was used, which will be described below.
Here we were specifically interested in our participants’ topic knowledge for reading, that
is, knowledge related to the topic of the passage these experts would be reading. The topic
knowledge measures for both reading and history consisted of 15 multiple choice items in which
participants were asked to choose the response best completing the sentence stem. The general
topic covered by the history topic knowledge measure was slavery, and the topic of the reading
topic knowledge measure was psycholinguistic theory. In each item, the response choices
represented four possible tiers of knowledge (Alexander, Murphy, & Kulikowich, 1998): the
correct response that best completed the sentence stem (4 points), a response that was relevant
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but was not the best answer (2 points), a response that related to psycholinguistics but was not
related to the topic of the sentence (1 point), and an unrelated response (0 points). A sample item
for reading was: “phonology : word pronunciation :: morphology : _______ ,” where response
choices were: word meaning (4 points); word identification (2 points); word attack (1 point);
word processing (0 points). Reliability for this topic knowledge measure was adequate (again not
unexpected, given the small sample), at α = .661.
Learning outcomes. Learning outcomes in this study were assessed by four open-ended
questions completed from memory after reading each passage: (1) Write down as many
important points as you can remember from this passage; (2) Write down anything else you can
remember from the passage; (3) Write down the argument the author is making in this passage;
(4) Write down what you think about the argument. Participants were given a full blank sheet of
paper for each question. One participant (P6) dictated his responses to these outcome questions,
and the audiotape of his dictated responses was transcribed into a text document by the first
author.
Texts and task
Passages. The reading task used in this study involved texts from the domains of reading
and history that were selected and adapted to be as parallel as possible. The texts chosen were
expected to address relatively unfamiliar topics. Each of the passages chosen indirectly presents
an argument. In the reading passage, the argument is that skilled reading does not occur
primarily through the application of grapho-phonemic information or decoding, presented in the
context of an explanation of the psycholinguistic model of reading. In the history passage, the
author argues that the slavery system based on race evolved partially as an attempt to address the
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class struggle that was mounting in the colonies; although this interpretation is directly stated,
the passage is not constructed explicitly as an argument for this thesis.
The selected passages were intended to present similar levels of difficulty for readers in
terms of length, structure, and reading level. The reading passage was taken from an article on
practical applications of a psycholinguistic model of reading (Pearson, 1978) that appeared in a
book targeted for reading researchers, graduate students, or teachers. In its adapted form, it is
1173 words long with two footnotes, with a Flesch-Kincaid reading level of 12.0, and a Flesch
reading ease score of 40.5 (from Microsoft Word). Although not from a textbook, the history
passage was taken from a text on U.S. history (Takaki, 1993) usually used at a college level,
professionally written and appealing also to an adult audience interested in history. In its adapted
form, it is 1393 words long with six footnotes, and had a Flesch-Kincaid reading level of 12.0
and a Flesch reading ease score of 38.5. The adaptations made were all excisions, in order to
create a self-contained passage of a reasonable length.
Task. Participants were asked to think aloud while reading each of these passages, and
their think-aloud was recorded on an audiotape. They were told to verbalize what they were
thinking and doing as they read each passage, and practiced thinking aloud on a short passage
before moving on to the reading and history passages. They were told that when they finished
reading the passage, they would be asked to respond to open-ended questions regarding what
they remembered and what they thought about the passage. These think-alouds were intended to
provide data on strategy use, interest, and overall engagement with the reading activity.
Coding. All 14 think-alouds (two for each participant) were jointly coded for strategic
and evaluative/monitoring behaviors by the first three authors. We initially coded them
separately and then met and created a consensus coding reflecting our joint understanding. We
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started out using the set of 24 codes developed in our pilot study in which undergraduates read
these same two passages (Fox et al., 2007). In order to account for what we saw in the processing
of these expert readers, we found it necessary to add seven new codes relating to: evaluating the
argument, evaluating the author’s intent, using text features, connecting to context (domain
discourse), arguing with text, rehearsing, and establishing goal. We also split one code into two
separate codes: elaborating and interpreting/hypothesizing. We dropped or merged three codes,
those relating to: evaluating task difficulty, visualizing, and expressing interest/surprise. This
modified set of 29 codes proved to be adequate to capture the vast majority of relevant behaviors
demonstrated; a list of these codes with examples from the transcripts is given in Appendix A.
After this initial fine-grained coding, the transcripts were gone over again, looking for
evidence of particular goal-related behaviors. This was accomplished in two steps. In the first
step, a catalogue of all codes was created across participants and passages. This served as a
secondary reliability and validity check, in that the consistency with which the codes had been
assigned could be more directly assessed. These code categories were then associated with
possible goals at which the behaviors falling under each category could reasonably be aimed. A
theoretically-derived taxonomy of possible goals while reading was developed (Fox et al., 2005);
this appears in Appendix B. These hierarchically ordered goals are: remembering the text,
understanding the text, evaluating the text’s message, and evaluating the text as a medium, with
each being broken out into possible sub-goals related to the local or global level of the outcome.
Each code category was either determined to be not assignable to a specific goal, or was assigned
to one or more possible goals with which the behaviors identified under that category might be
associated. In some cases this was unambiguous and immediately obvious, while in other cases
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additional contextualization would be necessary. A table giving examples of codes associated
with specific goals is given in Appendix C.
We then returned to the transcripts and the first and second author independently recoded the transcripts for evidence of goals. Although it is possible and likely that our participants
were aiming at multiple goals at the same time, we aimed at identifying the primary and directly
evident text-related goal associated with these instances of their verbalizations and behaviors.
We summarized those goal codings in terms of the strength of the evidence they provided that
our participants were working toward these levels of goals – we either saw no evidence, saw a
single instance of a behavior suggesting a particular level of goal, saw multiple instances of the
same type of behavior suggesting a particular level, or saw multiple instances of a variety of
behaviors suggesting a particular level of goal. We collapsed the local/global distinction here and
concentrated on nine basic levels of goals. We had substantial agreement on the nature of the
evidence we detected for these goals, with 86% exact agreement across all transcripts. Table 3
gives the combined codings for these identified goal levels.
Procedures
Participants were told that their participation would involve two components. In the first
part, participants were given, in order, the demographics questionnaire, interest questionnaire,
activities questionnaires, domain knowledge and topic knowledge measure for either reading or
history, and then the domain and topic knowledge measures for the other domain. Administration
of the knowledge measures was counterbalanced such that. There were no time limits for
completion. Participants were encouraged to respond to every item on each measure, and for the
knowledge measures, were told that guessing was okay. The average time for completing the
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first part was roughly 45 minutes. They could then take a brief break before beginning the
second part.
In the second part, participants practiced thinking-aloud with a short passage on
mosquitoes, from a popularly written science article by Marston Bates (1975) originally
published in Natural History magazine. This passage was intended to be mildly interesting but
not too challenging, so that participants might naturally find themselves responding to the topic
and descriptions. After practice, participants then read and thought aloud for either the reading or
history passage. This thinking-aloud was audiotaped. Participants were instructed that they could
either read the text itself aloud or not, as they chose, while they were reading and thinking aloud.
Participants were also told that if they remained silent for an extended period, they would be
prompted to say what they were thinking.
When participants indicated that they were finished reading the passage, the passage was
taken away, and they were given the packet of outcome questions. They were told that they could
complete the questions in any order and look back and forth between their responses on the
questions if they wished. Upon completing the outcome questions, the participants were again
reminded of the think-aloud directions and given the other passage, following the same
procedure as outlined above. Administration of passages was counterbalanced such that the four
participants who saw the reading knowledge measures first also saw the reading passage first,
and similarly for the three participants who saw the history measures first. There was no time
limit for these tasks. Participants tended to take very nearly the same time for each passage, and
the average time for the second session was again roughly 45 minutes. The think-alouds were
transcribed into text documents by the first author.
Results
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Knowledge and interest
Overall, participants’ scores on the domain and topic knowledge measures for reading
and history were high, and their scores for history knowledge considerably lower, as would be
expected. Their average interest also reflected the expected difference between domains, with
reading-related interest scores much higher than history-related interest scores. Table 2 provides
overall mean scores for knowledge and interest for both domains, and Table 3 gives the breakouts by participants. We did see some differences between participants in terms of level of
knowledge of the topic of psycholinguistics. Two participants got perfect scores on the topic
knowledge measure (56 points) and one was near perfect (53), while others came in with
considerably lower performance..
Goals
Our three expectations regarding goals tended to be supported by the data from our
coding for goals, which are given in Table 4. Our first expectation was that we would see expert
readers pursuing multiple levels of goals. We did see that overall, these expert readers appearing
to be pursuing multiple levels of goals while reading these texts. Further, we saw relatively
strong evidence that each of these specific theoretically-derived levels of goals was being
pursued, in that both coders identified multiple instances of different types of behaviors aimed at
each of these levels. The one exception was evaluation of text quality, and the reason for that
was that only one type of behavior was coded as indicating evaluation of text quality. But both
coders did see multiple instances of particular readers engaging in evaluation of text quality.
Our second expectation was that these readers who were experts in the domain of reading
would, by virtue of their greater levels of knowledge and interest for reading, engage more
frequently in higher-level processing associated with higher-level goals such as evaluation and
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situation of the text and its argument in context for the reading passage. This expectation was
also borne out by the evidence as presented in Table 4. Each reader was seen to engage in a
greater variety of higher-level goals for the reading passage than for the history passage. In
particular, five of the seven participants tried to understand the argument in context for the
reading passage, but only two for the history passage.
Our third expectation was that participants who started out with stronger background
knowledge of psycholinguistics would tend to engage more deeply with the reading text than
those who did not have such knowledge. Table 5 presents participants’ levels of goals for the
reading passage organized by their topic knowledge scores. It appears that readers with lower
levels of knowledge tended to be not quite as active in pursuing higher-level goals as those with
higher levels of knowledge, but this expectation is not unambiguously supported by our findings.
Outcomes
One interesting piece of information emerged from the outcome performances of these
experts with regard to their evaluation of the author’s argument (question 4). All seven
participants offered criticisms of the author’s argument for the reading passage, while the
majority of them did not feel qualified to criticize the argument for the history passage, making
comments such as: “Compelling + believable, although I’ve not too much knowledge too
challenge major assertions,” (P1); “Cannot judge as I read the article as a statement of historical
fact rather than a position statement,” (P3); and “Seems reasonable – I don’t have any prior
knowledge to dispute the author’s claims” (P7). And of the three who did offer criticisms of the
author’s argument in the history passage (P4, P5, P6), only one (P6) had attempted to understand
the argument in context while reading. None had attempted to evaluate the argument in context,
and two (P4, P6) had shown no evidence of evaluating the content of the argument itself.
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Overall reading activity and performance
To present a more complete picture of what we saw from these expert readers, descriptive
qualitative profiles of their approach to this reading situation follow.
P1 – Reading as Meaningful Dialogue. P1 was a male full professor, 48 years old, who
had received his PhD in 1985. P1’s think-alouds were extremely rich and long; the transcript of
his reading think-aloud was 12 pages, while that for his history think-aloud was 8 pages. He read
nearly all of each passage aloud. Although P1 began the reading of the first passage
acknowledging that the study created an atypical reading situation, he seemed very quick to set
personal goals for reading the texts. He approached both passages in a similar way, looking for
context and argument from the very beginning, although he was ready to focus on issues of
understanding when necessary.
One of the most striking features of P1’s approach emerging from the transcript is the
number of evaluations and elaborations of the texts. For P1, almost every sentence became an
occasion to comment on the specific content, on the quality of the argument and of the text, and
on the broader implications of the ideas encountered both for the domains and for the larger
socio-political environment. Far from being a mere exercise in rhetoric, P1 engaged the authors
of the texts at a very personal level, as a meaningful and personally relevant dialogue. However,
these elaborations on the texts did not prevent P1’s ability to build a contextualized and critical
understanding of the content and of the arguments. Similarly, the openness of his views on the
topics did not prevent him from evaluating the grounding of his judgments. Thus, although he
fully identified and contextualized the arguments in both passages, he acknowledged that he
needed more information about the specific historical period in order to decide about the merit of
the historical argument. On the contrary, P1 had no trouble in evaluating the merit and the
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implications of the reading passage, a text that allowed him to revisit a part of domain history
that is also his own.
P2 – Reading with a Local Focus. P2 was a 49 year old female doctoral student and
reading specialist. P2 read considerable portions of each passage aloud during her think-alouds,
the transcripts of which were each 5 pages in length. In reading the texts, P2 focused almost
exclusively on understanding and evaluating individual ideas. This overall stance was consistent
across the reading of both passages and is well documented by the analyses of the think-alouds.
For example, P2 often restated the content of sentences or short paragraphs, linking the
information from the texts with her prior knowledge and asking questions when she was not
satisfied by her level of comprehension. However, she very rarely focused on global
understanding or evaluation of the content of the texts.
Beside these similarities, a few interesting differences emerged across the two domains.
In approaching the reading passage, P2 immediately noticed the date of the article and situated it
in the domain discourse of the time; in approaching the history passage, she looked at the title,
searching for some clues about the content of the text, but she did not pay attention to the author,
or to the date of publication. However, in restating and evaluating the content of both texts, P2
never acknowledged the authors, but attributed these claims to the “it” or “that” of an authorless
text.
A second difference regarded the amount of evaluation of claims across the two domains.
In the reading passage, restatement and evaluation of content followed each other almost
constantly, while evaluation of content happened more rarely during the reading of the history
text. However, in both domains, these evaluations regarded single aspects of the texts and did not
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address the arguments advanced by the authors, an occurrence that is consistent with her lack of
acknowledgment of the writers.
P3 – Variations Across Domains. P3 was a female assistant professor. She was 30 years
old, and had received her PhD in 2002. Overall, the way in which P3 read the two texts differed
markedly, although she spent approximately the same amount of time reading each. The
transcript of her think-aloud for each passage was two pages long; she read small portions of
each text aloud, and read under her breath as well. In reading the history passage, she focused
almost exclusively on the local understanding of text content. The think-aloud did not reveal any
attempt at building a global understanding of the passage; evaluation of the content or of the
argument were also absent. In contrast, P3 repeatedly reported that she was trying “to figure out”
what the author was saying in the reading passage, although she concluded the think-aloud
questioning her understanding of his argument. P3’s comparatively low prior knowledge of the
topic did not facilitate her comprehension of the reading text, making her dismiss those claims
that probably contrasted with her prior understandings. Finally, although P3 never named the
authors of either text, she repeatedly addressed the author of the reading passage as “he”, while
she linked the claims in the history passage to a more generic “they” only rarely.
P4 – Reading for Content. P4 was a female post-doctoral student. She was 38 years old
and had received her PhD in 2005. She spent longer and verbalized more while reading the
reading text than the history text, with a four page transcript for reading and a 2 page transcript
for history. She read aloud while skimming and paraphrasing the text content for both passages.
The main feature of P4’s reading was a focus on understanding individual ideas expressed in the
text. P4 was the only participant who underlined and circled parts of the texts while reading and
her markings seemed to serve the purpose of identifying the main ideas expressed in a paragraph.
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Her attention was mainly on identifying and understanding the content of the texts; none of her
comments suggested that she was engaging with the arguments made by the authors, nor that she
was recognizing them as such, although, in the case of the reading passage, she demonstrated her
agreement or disagreement with individual statements. In addition, she treated the content of the
text as authorless, although she checked the date of publication of the reading article.
Although this process was consistent across the two passages, P4 reached this goal in a
different way across the two domains. In reading the history text, she alternated a focus on
understanding individual sentences with a focus on the main idea expressed in the paragraph,
while in the reading passage she immediately aimed at a more global level of understanding.
P5 – Reading Globally and Contextually. P5 was a female assistant professor, 62 years
old, who had received her PhD in 1990. P5 spent similar amounts of time and verbalized a
similar amount for each passage, with a 2 page transcript for the reading passage, and a 1 ½ page
transcript for the history passage. She did no reading aloud of the texts. P5 approached the
reading task similarly across the domains, focusing immediately on contextualizing the texts by
identifying their authors. For both passages, she also tried to build a global understanding of the
text content and of the authors’ arguments. However, the way in which she reached these goals
was different across the two domains. With the history text, she focused at first on the local
understanding of individual ideas and began only later in the reading to weave these units
together, reaching a global comprehension and evaluation of the argument only when she arrived
at the end of the passage. On the other hand, her familiarity with the topic of the reading text
allowed her to engage the content and the argument of the text from the very beginning, so that
the author’s claims were continuously contextualized and evaluated. Interestingly, P5
occasionally focused her attention on particular words employed by the authors and, in the case
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of the history passage, she also wondered whether anybody knew how the distinction between
indentured servants and slaves actually developed, both occurrences that signal her awareness of
the author in the text.
P6 – Reading for Global, Contextualized Argument. P6 was a male full professor, 63
years old, who had received his PhD in 1968. He spent similar amounts of time and verbalized
similarly across the two passages, with 5-page transcripts of his think-alouds for each passage.
He read aloud small portions, but did more skimming and paraphrasing for both passages. P6
was the only participant in our study who clearly expressed awareness of a difference between
his usual reading goals and the goals imposed by the study’s task. He was also the only
participant who explicitly revisited and rehearsed the main ideas of each text once he completed
the readings. Across the two passages, P6 actively tried to understand the author’s argument,
situating it in the domain context. However, the way in which he reached these goals differed
across the two texts. Being very familiar with the content of the reading passage, P6 focused
mainly on the rhetorical purpose of the author and on the significance of his argument for the
reading domain; almost no effort was spent on understanding the content. Although P6 began
reading the history passage in a similar way, trying to understand its “theme,” a word that he
later used to indicate the rhetorical purpose of the text, he then alternated understanding of
content at the local and global level with understanding of argument, initially also at the local
level. However, his use of the specific features of the history text (footnotes) allowed him to
identify the author’s argument of the author, and to begin placing it in the domain context
In addition, P6’s awareness of the text’s author was very evident; however, while in the
reading passage the author was immediately identified as “a friend and colleague” and always
referred to as “he,” in the history text this personal identification appeared only later on in the
22
reading, once the historical argument became more evident. It was only at this point that P6
began to refer to the author of specific claims as “he,” in contrast to the more general “they”
previously used.
P7 - Local Understandings and Global Evaluations. P7 was a female full professor. She
was 53 years old and had received her PhD in 1984. P7 read the two texts in a very similar way,
and the transcripts of her think-alouds were equally brief, one page for each passage. She did no
reading aloud. P7 began by trying to predict the overall content of the text and then focused on
understanding it locally; in both cases, she concluded by evaluating the global argument of the
text, although she did not seem to pay much consideration to its nuances. In addition, she
evidenced awareness of the author only in the reading passage, but seemed to conceive the
history text as authorless; thus, it is difficult to determine whether she read the author’s historical
interpretation as an argument or whether she treated it as factual information.
Conclusions/Implications
The reading experts demonstrated the expected high levels of individual interest and
domain knowledge in the domain of reading, and lower levels of interest and domain and topic
knowledge for history. They varied considerably in their response to the reading text and in their
pre-assessed knowledge of psycholinguistics. There was considerable variation in their
individual approaches to the reading task, in terms of their level of verbalization during the
think-alouds and their observed level of interaction with the text. Readers tended to be consistent
in their approach and amount of verbalization across the two passages. The reading experts also
tended to evaluate the argument more critically for the reading passage than for the history
passage.
23
There was evidence of pursuit of multi-layered reading goals, as readers evaluated their
own understanding of words, sentences, paragraphs, of the passage as a whole, of the author’s
argument, and of the position of the argument within the realm of domain discourse. However,
these reading experts appeared to be much more strongly positioned for pursuit of higher level
goals in regard to the reading passage..
The road to domain expertise in academic domains is traveled with the aid of reading.
Proficient reading and its role in knowledge building can facilitate a reader’s development of
academic expertise. Learning from text in an academic domain does not happen automatically or
identically; the roles of knowledge and interest in shaping strategic processing and supporting
learning have long been recognized (James, 1992). One way to illuminate the nature of that
shaping and support is to look at reading goals. In order to understand what readers get out of
reading it seems essential to consider what they are trying to get out of reading. Development of
an articulated understanding of the role of self-determined reading goals for readers at varying
levels of knowledge and interest will provide a vocabulary and structure around which
instruction can be framed. This is a messy and complex task, particularly when considering how
readers approach real-life reading situations, but it seems one well-worth beginning to address.
24
References
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press.
Alexander, P. A. (1998). The nature of disciplinary and domain learning: The knowledge,
interest, and strategic dimensions of learning from subject-matter text. In C. Hynd (Ed.),
Learning from text across conceptual domains (pp. 263-287). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
Alexander, P. A. (2002, December). Profiling the developing reader: The interplay of
knowledge, interest, and strategic processing. Oscar Causey address presented at the
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Alexander, P. A., Murphy, P. K. & Kulikowich, J. M. (1998). What responses to domain-specific
analogy problems reveal about emerging competence: A new perspective on an old
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challenging texts: Exposing the fragile understanding of college students. In P. Alexander
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(Chair). Fragile understanding: When good ideas go bad. Symposium presented at the
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Marton, F., & Säljö, R. (1976). On qualitative differences in learning: I-Outcome and process.
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Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
Pintrich, P. R. (2000). The role of goal orientation in self-regulated learning. In M. Bokaerts, P.
Pintrich, & M. Zeidner (Eds.) Handbook of self-regulation (pp. 451-502). San Diego,
CA: Academic Press.
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RAND Reading Study Group (2002). Reading for understanding: Toward an R&D program in
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Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (1991). Literate expertise. In K. A. Ericsson & J. Smith (Eds.)
Toward a general theory of expertise (pp. 172-194). New York, NY: Cambridge
University Press.
26
Takaki, R. (1993). A different mirror: A history of multicultural America. Boston: Little, Brown,
& Co.
Tapiero, I. (2007). Situation models and levels of coherence: Toward a definition of
comprehension. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
27
Appendix A
Codes for Think-Alouds
Strategic behaviors

Reading aloud

Re-reading

Reading on (following statement of non-comprehension) [“I’ll have to see what he has to
say.”]

Skimming (reading aloud while skipping portions)

Guessing the meaning of a word in context [“Liminality. I’m assuming that means that
they were – I’m not sure what that means. They were within some type of limit, I guess.”]

Predicting [“He’s about, he’s about to explain it, I think.”]

Questioning [“So this distinction exists, what is the distinction?”]

Underlining [“I’m underlining grapho-phonemic and symbol-sound. … … … I’m
underlining syntactic and semantic. And circling distinction.”]

Using text feature [“This is the new sub-heading”]

Restating (paraphrase) or repeating text information
-
local (word, phrase, sentence level) [“So the order of the words, he’s saying, is less
… valuable than what the words mean.”]
-
global (paragraph, passage level) [“Oh, so they wanted to decrease the number of
white indentured servants because they saw them as much more of a threat, in, to
their economic advantage. And to, to increase the black population.”]

Making connections
28
-
to background knowledge [“And that, that explanation of indentured servitude pretty
much fits my mental model.”]
-
to personal experience [“I see that it’s written by Dave Pearson who’s a close friend
of mine and we actually are working on quite a number of projects right now.”]
-
to prior text [“So as the passage said earlier, the issues were more rooted in class than
in race.”]
-
to topic knowledge test [“Well, that item was in the test we just took.”]
-
to context (domain discourse) [“I know that Takaki’s work is very, um, debated.
Some people love it, some people hate it.”]

Interpreting/hypothesizing (a statement building upon what directly said in the text) [“But
the issue is whether or not, how consciously, um, the landowners – pushed the whiteblack class issue.”]

Elaborating (a statement moving away from what is directly said in the text) [“I mean,
those are exact- exactly the kind of strategies that I think a lot of students are being taught
today, with the, with the great big push on standardized assessment.”]

Arguing with the text [“But you’d have to have some grapho-phonic clues to figure that
out, because it could be the astronomer looked through the window, the astronomer
looked through something else. So you still need the grapho-phonic clues to confirm it.
Which he does say there, but.”]

Establishing a goal for reading [“So what I’m trying to get now is, what is this about, you
know, the theme.”]
29

Rehearsing material from the text [“So if I was gonna try to remember this for future
purposes of my own recollection, I would say, I would kind of go back across major
points.”]
Monitoring/Evaluative behaviors

Evaluating comprehension (positive or negative) [“I am not following this at all.”]

Evaluating agreement with text (positive or negative) [”I don’t know that I agree with
that.”]

Evaluating text quality [“And this is a nice sentence and set of following questions that I
think can help people focus on the importance of syntax and how much we do use it
sometimes to help us construct meaning.”]

Evaluation of interest (positive or negative) [“This is new and interesting to me.”]

Evaluation of importance of text [“And I – this is a really important paragraph, too.”]

Evaluation of argument [“Well that, thank you, Ron Takaki, that’s part of what I was
asking, but I’m still not sure where you’re getting your stuff from.”]

Evaluation of author intent [“Um, who’s he writing for here, search and destroy. Hm,
maybe teachers, maybe graduate students.”]

Expression of empathy (sympathy or feelings felt or imputed to others) [“And that’s
really sad, the, the men and women being in the same line as the cows, and the oxen.”]
30
Appendix B
Coding for Text-related Goals
A. Remembering
1. Remembering text details
2. Remembering text important points
B. Understanding
1. Understanding the text content
a. local understanding of text (word or sentence level)
b. global understanding of text (paragraph or larger level)
2. Understanding the author’s meaning – the argument
a. local understanding of argument (sentence level)
b. global understanding of argument (paragraph or larger level)
3. Understanding the argument in context – as situated in domain discourse
C. Evaluating the Message
1. Evaluating agreement with the content of the text (accuracy of text)
a. local
b. global
2. Evaluating agreement with the argument
a. local
b. global
3. Evaluating the argument in context – as situated in domain discourse
D. Evaluating the Medium
1. Evaluating text quality
a. local
b. global
2. Evaluating argument quality
a. local
b. global
31
Appendix C
Rehearse –Evidence of goal A1, A2, remember important points and details.
“So if I was gonna try to remember this for future purposes of my own recollection, I would say,
I would kind of go back across major points. First one, indentured servants outnumbered
everyone else, seventy-five percent in 1664. Um, They were vagabonds and cheats. Um, then
whites and blacks were a little bit, initially, leery of each other, but then started to escape
together, after a while, there was uneven treatment. Um, blacks were treated much worse, and,
uh, whites were given lesser sentences. And by nine, by sixteen sixty one, or, no, eight years
later, sixteen sixty nine, seems to me like a cool date. Sixteen sixty nine, Virginia legislature
defined them as property. Um, blacks, slaves, didn’t increase too much, white slaves increased
more, or – and started to become free.”
Read on–Evidence of goal B1a – local understanding of text
“But we’ll see where we go with this.”
Guess meaning of word in context – Evidence of goal B1a – local understanding of text
“Liminality. I’m assuming that means that they were – I’m not sure what that means. They were
within some type of limit, I guess.”
Question – Possible evidence of goal B1a – local understanding of text or goal B3 –
understanding the argument in context
“Ok, I’m thinking, um, where, which Africans, when, what part of the colonies” B1a
“what’s the rhetorical, you know, purpose of this text. Um, planters who bought slaves instead of
servants. Takaki, what’s his interest in this whole thing.” B3
Interpret/hypothesize – Evidence of goal B1 – understand text content
[P6 R p2-3, 22-1] “I’m thinking of these words, these vocabulary words as being those labels
that represent these concepts.”
Restate (local) – Evidence of goal B1 – understanding text content
“Ok, a landed elite enacting legislation to advance and protect their class interests.”
Re-read – Possible evidence of goal B1 – understanding text content
“Okay. I’m gonna re-read this, ‘cause I want to make sure I understand the distinction here.”
Skim – Possible evidence of goal B1 – understanding text content
32
“… the active role of the store of semantic and syntactic – already existing in the reader’s
knowledge. Okay. … assign primary activity to decoding processes, semantic syntactic to the
role of verifying…”
Connect to prior text – Possible evidence of goal B1b – global understanding of text
“but it says up here that they were, um, that there were basically in the same class at that point.”
Mark on text – Possible evidence of goal B1b – global understanding of text
“I like to write when I read, and underline important words, and think about – what they mean.
… And I’m underlining certain sets of words appearing in the same context fit together.”
Restate (global) – Possible evidence of goal of B1b – global understanding of text or B2b –
global understanding of argument
“This article has been talking about psycholinguistics primarily” B1b
“What I’m learning here though is it seems that in the beginning the Virginia colony did not have
a class of slave; it had indentured servants and that there was an evolution for the African
American servants into slavery.” B2b
Predict – Possible evidence of goal B1b – global understanding of text or B2b global
understanding of argument
“Okay, so it’s going to be about multiculturalism in America.” B1b
“I’m looking forward to a couple paragraphs at least talking about how the class of a particular
people allows them to eventually adopt a system of slavery.” B2b
Interpret/hypothesize – Evidence of goal B2 – understanding the argument, goal B3 –
understand argument in context or goal C3 – evaluate argument in context
“I think he’s saying that syntax and semantics are more important, and he doesn’t really like
phonics.” B2
“but it seems to me to be carrying some foundational knowledge and claims about the
importance of language knowledge to reading, to learning how to read, to successfully learning
how to read.” C3
“it shows one historian playing with another’s ideas and in this case saying, ‘here’s a guy who
wrote a whole book about this whole issue and I’d like to push it a little bit farther.” B3
Identify/use text feature – Possible evidence of goal B1 – understanding the text content,
goal B2 - understanding the argument, or goal B3 – understanding the argument in context
33
“I’m reading the title, because I’m hoping it’s gonna give me an idea of what’s – It gives me an
idea of what I’m reading about here” B1
“I’m going back to see when this was written.” B3
“Okay, I’m reading the footnote for, seeing how that is, what this is from.” B2
Evaluate importance – Evidence of goal B2b – Global understanding of argument.
“And I – this is a really important paragraph, too”
Evaluate author intent – Evidence of goal B3 – understanding the argument in context
“In this last paragraph, he, he sees himself as extending, um, a more, let’s see, views of reading
where efficient readers assign primary activity to decoding. So he’s, he’s extended it to syntax
and to semantics.”
Connect to context (domain discourse) – Evidence of goal B3 – understanding the
argument in context or goal C3 – evaluating the argument in context
“Okay. Now I’m understanding a little better why Pearson is taking this point of view. Uh, I
didn’t notice that this was published in 1978. So that really is before so much of the work on
total text comprehension had even been started.” B3
“I like, uh, I like histories of America that are I’d say non-traditional, traditional being you know,
white men, powerful white men and what they did to make our country great.” C3
Argue/disagree with text– Evidence of goal C1a – evaluate agreement with content of the
text or goal C2b – evaluating agreement with argument - global
“Well, you know, I’d quibble with that, um, the notion of demonstrating that you’ve understood
what you’ve read is ah - that’s a really short um – it’s a really small slice of how you might
demonstrate. Um - It’s the most typical and it’s the most valued assessment-wise, answering
these questions, but we know there’s lots of ways to demonstrate what you’ve understood and
actually you don’t get much past I would say surface demonstration of understanding when you
do these tricks to answer questions, because the questions themselves are surface level.” C1a
“one difference that I can see that they don’t mention here is that it looks to me as if the white
indentured servants from England chose to come, and, uh, … slaves from Africa didn’t.” C2b
Evaluate agreement – Evidence of goal C1a – evaluating agreement with the content of the
text (accuracy of the text) or goal C2b – Evaluating agreement with the argument.
“Um, I’m not sure that the last 2 decades of what’s it called – eye movement data support that
assertion that there’s sort of a minimal or as much as needed sampling of print that we need to
try to affirm our predictions. I think it’s actually much closer to word-by-word reading.” C1a
34
“But I do agree that, with good readers, decoding is less important.” C2b
Connect to prior knowledge – knew – Possible evidence of goal C1 – evaluating agreement
with the content of the text
“I thought slaves automatically served for the rest of their life. You know, once they were slaves,
they were slaves forever.”
Evaluate text quality – Evidence of goal D1 – Evaluating text quality, either local or global.
“That wasn’t written very well, I don’t think. [laughs]. That was a little too confusing.”
Evaluate argument (source, structure, quality/agreement) – Evidence of goals D2 –
evaluating agreement with the argument or evaluating argument quality.
“I haven’t read up to a point where I even start engaging with footnotes so this is all stuff that the
author’s telling me. I pretty much have to take it as legitimate claims” D2
Establish/state goal – Evidence of stated goal.
“So what I’m trying to get now is, what is this about, you know, the theme,” B1b
Connect to personal experience - Not necessarily goal-related.
Connect to prior knowledge – Not necessarily goal-related.
Connect to topic knowledge test/earlier task – Not goal-related
Elaborate – Not necessarily goal-related
Express interest/surprise – Not necessarily goal-related
Express empathy/moral judgment – Not goal-related
Read aloud – Not goal-related
35
Table 1
Demographic Data
ID
Gender/Age
Ethnic Background
Year Received PhD
Academic Position
(when data collected)
Full professor
1
M - 48
European-American
1985
2
F - 49
European-American
--
3
F - 30
European-American
2002
Doctoral student,
Reading specialist
Assistant professor
4
F - 38
European-American
2005
Post-doctoral student
5
F - 62
European-American
1990
Associate professor
6
M - 63
European-American
1968
Full professor
7
F - 53
European-American
1984
Full professor
Table 2
Overall Reading and History Knowledge and Interest Means
Measure
Domain
knowledge
Topic
knowledge
Subject-related
Interest
Activity-related
Interest
Reading
mean (sd)
(n = 7)
History
mean (sd)
(n = 7)
63.00 (8.23)
35.57 (6.80)
49.00 (6.63)
24.57 (0.53)
35.86 (6.09)
18.43 (5.97)
52.57 (6.97)
27.29 (8.88)
Note: Maximum possible scores:
domain knowledge = 80
topic knowledge = 56
subject-related interest = 25
activity-related interest = 75
36
Table 3
Individual Reading and History Knowledge and Interest Scores
Participant
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Reading
Domain
Knowledge
66
64
52
62
78
63
64
Note: Maximum possible scores:
domain knowledge = 80
topic knowledge = 56
subject-related interest = 25
activity-related interest = 75
Reading
Topic
Knowledge
53
56
44
38
47
56
56
Reading
Subject
Interest
24
25
24
25
24
25
25
Reading
Activity
Interest
53
46
55
63
44
59
48
History
History
Domain
Topic
Knowledge Knowledge
47
37
40
43
31
29
26
26
38
38
34
38
40
43
History
Subject
Interest
25
22
15
23
22
10
12
History
Activity
Interest
39
24
20
41
25
21
21
37
Table 4
Goal Level by Participant, Passage, and Type of Evidence
GOAL LEVEL
1 R 1 H 2 R 2 H 3 R 3 H 4 R 4 H 5 R 5 H 6 R 6 H 7R 7 H
A - Remember text
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
X
X
0
0
B1 - Understand text
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
B2 - Understand argument
x
X
0
0
0
0
0
x
X
X
0
0
B3 - Understand argument in context
X
X
x
0
0
0
x
0
X
X
X
0
0
C1 - Evaluate text content
X
X
X
X
X
0
X
x
0
x
X
0
x
x
0
0
0
0
0
X
0
0
0
X
0
0
0
x
X
0
0
C2 – Evaluate argument content
C3 - Evaluate argument in context
X
X
0
0
0
0
D1 - Evaluate text quality
X
X
X
0
x
0
D2 - Evaluate argument quality
X
X
0
x
0
0
0
0
0
x = one piece of evidence, as determined by both coders
X = multiple instances of single type of behavior, as determined by both coders
X = multiple instances of multiple types of behaviors, as determined by both coders
0 = no evidence, as determined by both coders
R = Reading passage
H – History passage
0
0
38
Table 5
Goal Level for Reading Passage by Score on Topic Knowledge Test
Participant ID
6
2
1
7
5
3
4
Score on Psycholinguistic Knowledge
56
56
53
49
47
44
38
A - Remember text
X
0
0
0
0
0
0
B1 - Understand text
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
B2 - Understand argument
X
0
x
0
0
0
B3 - Understand argument in context
X
x
X
0
X
0
x
C1 - Evaluate text content
x
X
X
X
X
C2 – Evaluate argument content
0
0
C3 - Evaluate argument in context
X
0
D1 - Evaluate text quality
D2 - Evaluate argument quality
GOAL LEVEL
X
X
x
0
X
0
0
0
X
X
X
x
0
X
0
0
0