Conclusiones y Recomendaciones.

So little is known about the actual demands childr-en face when r etrieving information from library systems that much of what follows must be s p eculative. Clearly, they face all the d emands associated with reading for meaning but the ,..- e a ding task itself is complicated by the n ature of information ret,..-ieval. Fi,..-stly, the materials encoun tered d u,..-ing class,..-oom reading tasks a,..-e likely to have been selected with ca,..-eful rega,..-d for the childr en's reading

abili ties. Those found independently may challenge even the

best readers. Secondly, classroom materials may have been

chosen t o build on the level of prior knowle dge known to exist in students. In the lib,..-ary the students m a y pick relevant texts that assume a far higher level of prior knowledge, thus reducing their ability to i m pose m e a ning. Thi"" dly, in c l ass, "" eading tends to be in sho,..·t bU"" s t s of about 15 s econds, yet to find information for a p r o ject the student must read and reflect upon substantial pieces of text (Lunze,..· and Gardner, 1979). Dolan, Harrison a n d

Gardne,..· (1979) found that t h e g"" eatest incidences of

continuous ,..-eading in class a ctually occurred when childre n were reading between class a ctivities. Fu�ther, they found that "e}�perience of meaningful reading" across the

cu ,..-riculum b ecomes stabilized o r e ven reg"" esses during the fi"" st yea,..' of secondary schooling (equivalent to F o rm 1 in New Zealand) and. is of low priority throughout the pre­ examination yea,..·s (pI35). Added t o this, r e ading speeds tend to b e far slower than adults expect and of c o urse,

or-ganization system t o f i n d t h e books in t h e first place. Thus, wher-e teachers are unaware of these complications, time a l lowed for libr-ary work may be insufficient to

produce much information. For example, one teacher was heard by the author to complain when, after a mere five minutes, Form 1 students had failed to find anything about ancient Egypt!

Not only must the learner read for comprehension but information gather ing for later use d ictates that additional short term r-eading goals be met. Lunzer (1979) describes four styles of reading which embody these. In his

description receptive reading equates to reading for

meanihg and involves immediate on-going interpretation, much like listening behaviours but in absence of the socially provided cues which aid comprehension monitoring.

Reflective reading is char acterized by appiication of

critical reading skills with frequent pauses for- reflection. To establish an overview of the te:<t the reader may skim r-ead r apidly and fina lly he or she may just scan the pages for s pecific wor-ds or- information units. Childr- en embar-king on independent project work may be told to skim or scan

but there is little evidence that they understand what is in involved in these. For example, Myers and Paris (1978,

ci ted b y Baker �� Brown, 1984b) found that 6th grade students assumed skimming to involve reading informative words, whereas 2nd grade students focused only on easy

words when skimming. The situation is further complicated

in that the efficient informa tion seeker- must switch

between these reading s tyles rapidly as dictated by the content of the text and its relevance to the question being researched.

This relationship implies another- major role for metacognition in that the relevance of the information encounter-ed is continu ally changing, both as a function of the learner getting a better idea of the importance of various aspects and as assessment of the growing

knowledge base points t o e>{plicit infor-mation gaps. Indeed, Br-own et al (1983) suggest that shifting attention as a

response to increments i n learning can be used as a non­

verbal reflection of on-line monitoring. As in studying, it

implies a need for informa tion on the current state of knowledge (i.e. aspects k nown and not known), knowledge of the t a sk demands of gist recall, knowledge of ordering te:<t elements with regard to their varying importance, and

metacognitive knowledge that allows s trategies to be marshalled i n response t o changing demands. The student who i s gathering information for subsequent use immediately uses the gist of what i s found to direct further

information seeking. The sophistication implied is

incr-edible, yet many children face this task with little support.

As previously stated, r- eading for meaning is a major­ element in information re trieval and use. How then, is this task likely to be modified in the conte:<t of information seeking? B aker- and Br-own (1984b) state that a n essential acti vity for good comprehension is to determine the

pur-pose of r-eading. The pur-poses essential to information

retrieval and use include comprehension that leads to

concept building and learning such that the knowledge gained can be used immediately to direct further information

r-e trieval as well as pr-o viding an o v erview of the topic to

aid more extensive processing later. However, Lunzer and

,

Gar-dner- (1979) have found that r-ea ding for lea,..-ning

purposes does not figure prominently in students' minds in

the ea rly secondary school years. Comprehension itself

depends in part upon linguistic and topic knowledge (Resnick, 1987), yet the students are likely to h a ve little of the latter and may be unable to predict which areas o f prior knowledge are relevant t o the new topic. They have to assess their understanding on the basis of incomplete information. For this r e a son alone, comprehension

monitor-ing may be impeded and students a,..-e likely to find them selves in the position of indulging i n "cognitive

boots trapping" (Resnick, 1989), that is, lacking firmly

established pr-ior knowledge but having t o b ehave as i f it e}:isted.

The kinds of comprehension failure to be monitored ar·e also modified by the task of information seeking. I n

particular, e v e n where an author has provided sufficient cues to activate relevant schemata and these are actually available to the student, comprehension may fail because ... ·eading for i nformation retrieval is highly selective. The university student may s elect articles and complete

chapters to read but the younger student may seek much smaller units of information - relev ant paragraphs or even single sentences. Thus although a n author may have

written a s u perbly structured and clear text, the Form 1 student is probably not about to read it from beginning to end. Instead, he or she generates some questions then scans the h eadings, reads a paragraph here and an

illustration caption there before passing on, thus maybe missing information essential to concept constr�ction. This pessimistic view may well characte ... ·ize the child who

approaches the t a sk with the aim of "finding the answer" rather than of constructing one.

The interaction betw een getting enough of the gist of text t o aid information gathering and reading to learn

about the topic i s likely to be complex and indeed, o n e suspects that often students w i l l be unable to a s s e s s the adequacy of the information found until they read i t in full and try to use it for report writing. In the situation where a student i s asked to "learn about x" Spiro and

Myers (1984) suggest that the best a pproach may be to "tentatively encode as much infor·mation as possible in as many ways a s possible" until such time that the learner has sufficient data to guide construction of more unifor·m representation and processing modes. These authors

discuss at l e ngth the differences between well-structured knowledge domains and entangled domains. . They hold that any domain will be represented in memory in an entangled manner prior t o l ear·ning the principles by which

o i s possible. Although Spiro and Myers' encoding instruction is s omewhat v ague, it seems

nature of this task is likely to increase the e:<tent of domain entanglement. A s far- as concept building goes, it appears that the selective nature of information seeking could be in conflict with reading to unders t and

relationships between information units.

Problems associated with comprehension monitoring in the face of incomplete knowledge have been noted above. These difficulties extend throughout the ra nge of semantic

evaluation standards discussed by B aker (1985). For­

example, standards of consistency must be constructed that

deal with multiple infor-mation sources. Detection of

inconsistencies within and between texts is an important cue to check sour-ces mor-e thoroughly, yet Baker- (1985) found that younger and poorer readers never used an internal consistency s tandar-d on a- single piece of te:<t. How then, will they cope with two s e p ar-ate books, or- even two chapter-s \l-Ji thin a single volume? Cri tical reading

skills are absolutely essential to information gathering but it appears that independent project work m a y be set

consider-ably in advance of any tuition in those skills.

In sum, reading for comprehension is a complex process which demands c oordination of many cogni ti v e and

metacognitive strategies. The student reading for

information retrieval must some how read for comprehension, allocating more attention to segments of text relevant to his or- her research purposes (somewhat akin to studying), but must do so in the absence of a n overall view of the topic which would help distinguish between important and tr-ivial points. Lunzer and Gardner (1979) suggest that, when reading for learning, the reader must carry on a conversation with the text, continually asking questions, finding answers and commenting. During information seeking the reader must extend this questioning t o consider

whether the material encountered is relevant, not only to the question that is driving information -s eeking, but in light of what has been found to date. However, this is only possible i f the i nformation found during the search is r-emember-ed in spite o f the large amount o f additional, and

maybe conflicting, information continually being fed into the system. This would suggest that encoding specificity and depth of processing have very important effects on library research outcomes. In addition, the student must assess the implications of information found for further searching. Clearly, this puts a heavy burden on memory and steps to make relevant material memorable will help. At some stage, students usually engage in traditional study techniques such as note-taking and begin to draw together essential infor-mation. However, this task must to some extent be tackled mentally during the information gathering stage.

It is apparent that the comprehension purposes of reading in the context of information seeking are

cir-cumscribed by the students' lack of topic knowledge, a possible inability to predict which areas of prior knowledge are relevant to it, and the selective nature of the task which may negate structural aids inherent in ��xts.

Guthrie (1982) concludes that basic research on the

cogni ti ve processes under lying learning from expository materials has shown that the goals of readers and the structures of texts mediate what is comprehended. In contrast to the limiting factors expressed above, these same materials provide cues which can be used to activate prior knowledge. Whether children engaged in information seeking use titles, contents pages, side headings and indexes in this manner is not known but it would appear that such use would help them identify elements of prior knowledge previously difficult to activate in isolation.

SUOARY

The foregoing literature review has examined the parameters of metacognitive concepts and focused on the cogni ti ve and metacogni ti ve demands of learning from text, suggesting ways in which these are modified for information retrieval. However, information retrieval demands that students also cope with the vagaries of library systems. The role of metacognition in the library information

insufficient liter-atur-e exists t o allow discussion in moroe depth. It is cle aro, though, that infor-mation r-etrieval puts

a double l oading on metacognitive abilities. The students

must constantly monitor- pr-�gress o n the infor-mation location t a sk a t the librar-y systems level while a ls o monitor-ing compr-ehension a n d an e v e r changing knowledge base. Pr-ogr-ess in one task deter-mines what will be found in the other- and what is found has implications for the futuroe pr-ocess of infor-mation seeking. Where little is known of the topic and the information r-etr-ieval process itself, it is unr-ealistic to e:{pect e fficient infor-mation

seeking. However, children do complete project a s s i gnments,

if inefficiently.

It has been said that "tasks r equiring troansfero and coordination of discer-nible elem�ntal skills" will probably prove most roeve aling in asses sing metacogni tion

(Meichenbaum, Buroland, Gruson �"- eameroon, 1985). The task of inforomation retroieval in the conte:o�t of school libr-ar-ies d�mands that a large aroroay of skills be integrated and therefore it appears to be an excellent vehicle for the e}�ploroation of metacogni ti ve functioning.

One recalls Liesener.ls (1985) comment about the futility of troying to impr-ove the teach ing of higher order cogni ti ve and prooble m-sol ving skills with a naive view of i n formation

use and users. The present s tudy aims to illuminate

infor-mation retrieval and use through the examination of students' thinking processes. The following chapter- r-evie�'>Js r-elevant studies and demonstrates how infor-mation r-etr-ieval tasks can be conceptualized for the purposes of

CHAPTER FOUR