DIFFERENCES IN THE USE OF SELECTIVE ATTENTION BY MORE SUCCESSFUL AND LESS SUCCESSFUL 10TH-GRADE READERS

Both more successful and less successful readers appear to use the selective attention strategy (SAS) to learn important text information; however, more successful readers tend to learn and recall considerably more important, as well as unimportant, information, The 2 studies reported here investigated the reason(s) for the more successful readers' learning and recall advantage. In Experiment 1, 10th graders were asked to read, learn, and recall information from a text on marine biology. Questions were inserted every 4 pages to manipulate text item importance. The results showed that more successful readers learned and recalled more important information than less successful readers because they were more metacognitively aware of how and when to use the SAS. In Experiment 2, perceptual and conceptual attention were measured for both more and less successful readers. More successful readers used significantly more conceptual attention while reading than did less successful readers.