Can Automated Questions Scaffold Children's Reading Comprehension?

Can automatically generated questions scaffold reading comprehension? We automated three kinds of multiple-choice questions in children’s assisted reading: 1. Whquestions: ask a generically worded What/Where/When question. 2. Sentence prediction: ask which of three sentences belongs next. 3. Cloze: ask which of four words best fills in a blank in the next sentence. A within-subject experiment in the spring 2003 version of Project LISTEN’s Reading Tutor randomly inserted all three kinds of questions during stories as it helped children read them. To compare their effects on story-specific comprehension, we analyzed 15,196 subsequent cloze test responses by 404 children in grades 1-4. • Whquestions significantly raised children’s subsequent cloze performance. • This effect was cumulative over the story rather than a recency effect. • Sentence prediction questions probably helped (p = .07). • Cloze questions did not improve performance on later questions. • The rate of hasty responses rose over the year. • Asking a question less than 10 seconds after the previous question increased the likelihood of the student giving a hasty response. The results show that a computer can scaffold a child’s comprehension of a text without understanding the text itself, provided it avoids irritating the student.