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Increasing Students’ Awareness of Sources of Information for Answering Questions

The ubiquity of oral and written questions in classrooms and reading tasks has been well established. It is obvious that students’ background knowledge is a primary determinant of how well they can answer comprehension-promoting or assessment-oriented questions. Less obvious is the need to access appropriate sources of information used in answering questions. A training study was conducted with 59 sixth grade students of high, average, and low reading ability levels, instructing half of students in each ability level in the relationship of a question, the text to which the question refers, and the reader’s knowledge base. Repeated measures multivariate analyses of variance on two passages indicate that the training enhanced students’ understanding of task demands of questions and their answer quality as measured by (a) their ability to correctly identify the question-answer relationship represented, (b) their consistency in providing an answer from the source of information they had indicated they were using, and (c) the quality of their answers. The training appeared to be most facilitative for those of average and lower ability levels, consistent with similar findings in other studies that trained cognitive skills. Knowledge of sources of information may be fundamental to students’ ability to access appropriate information for answering comprehensive questions.