Improving Native American children’s listening comprehension through concrete representations

The primary purpose of the present study was to determine whether recent findings documenting the benefits of text-related motor activity on young children’s memory for reading passages [Glenberg, A. M., Gutierrez, T., Levin, J. R., Japuntich, S., & Kaschak, M. (2004). Activity and imagined activity can enhance young readers’ reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96, 424–436.] could be extended to the text processing of Native American children. Forty-five third through seventh-grade students with academic learning difficulties listened to four narrative passages under one of three instructional conditions: manipulate, where students moved toy objects to represent the story’s content; visual, where students observed the results of an experimenter’s toy manipulations; and free-study, where students thought about the content of the presented story sentences. Findings were consistent with the literature documenting the comprehension and memory benefits of text-relevant concrete representations, with students in the manipulate and visual conditions statistically outrecalling students in the free-study condition. In contrast to the results of the Glenberg et al. (2004) reading study, no conditions-related differences were observed on a final passage where students were instructed to generate internal visual images of story events in the absence of external visual support (i.e., when no toys were present).