Paul Van Den Broek
Biographic Data
| ID | 104356 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul Van Den Broek |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul Van Den |
| FAMILY NAME | Broek |
| SIGNATURE | VAN DEN BROEK P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Leiden University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9058-721X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 239 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Using think-aloud methods to investigate inter- and intra-individual differences in reading processes
Education and Child Studies
From comprehension to learning and back again
Validation processes and reading purpose
People read for many different reasons. These goals affect the cognitive processes and strategies they use during reading. Understanding how reading goals exert their effects requires investigation of whether and how they affect specific component processes, such as validation. We investigated the effects of reading goal on text-based and knowledge-based validation processes during reading and on the resulting offline mental representation. We em…
Minding the load or loading the mind
Working memory plays an important role in complex cognitive tasks. For example, in the context of reading, it has been argued that working memory provides a workspace for maintenance and integration of different text units and relevant background knowledge. However, the amount of information that needs to held in mind is often at odds with the very restricted capacity traditionally posited by models of working memory. Moreover, direct evidence co…
Differentiating Text-Based and Knowledge-Based Validation Processes during Reading
To build a coherent accurate mental representation of a text, readers routinely validate information they read against the preceding text and their background knowledge. It is clear that both sources affect processing, but when and how they exert their influence remains unclear. To examine the time course and cognitive architecture of text-based and knowledge-based validation processes, we used eye-tracking methodology. Participants read versions…
Do Teachers Treat Their Students Differently? An Observational Study on Teacher-Student Interactions as a Function of Teacher Expectations and Student Achievement
Through classroom interactions, teachers provide their students with different opportunities to learn. Some kinds of interactions elicit more learning activities than others. With differential treatment of students, teachers may exacerbate or reduce achievement differences in their classroom. In addition, differential interactions may contribute to teacher expectation effects, with teachers treating their high-expectation students more favourably…
The impact of formative peer feedback on higher education students’ academic writing
Peer feedback is frequently implemented with academic writing tasks in higher education. However, a quantitative synthesis is still lacking for the impact that peer feedback has on students’ writing performance. The current study conveyed two types of observations. First, regarding the impact of peer feedback on writing performance, this study synthesized the results of 24 quantitative studies reporting on higher education students’ academic writ…
Peer feedback on academic writing
Within the higher education context, peer feedback is frequently applied as an instructional method. Research on the learning mechanisms involved in the peer feedback process has covered aspects of both providing and receiving feedback. However, a direct comparison of the impact that providing and receiving peer feedback has on students’ writing performance is still lacking. The current study compared the writing performance of undergraduate stud…
Validation
To create a coherent and correct mental representation of a text, readers must validate incoming information; they must monitor information for consistency with the preceding text and their background knowledge. The current study aims to contrast text- and knowledge-based monitoring to investigate their unique influences on processing and whether validation is passive or reader-initiated. Therefore, we collected reading times in a self-paced expe…
Cognitive Processes in Discourse Comprehension
As readers move through a text, they engage in various types of processes that, if all goes well, result in a mental representation that captures their interpretation of the text. With each new text segment the reader engages in passive and, at times, reader-initiated processes. These processes are strongly influenced by the readers’ representation of the preceding text and, in turn, update this very same representation. This updated representati…
Effects of Social-Cognitive Processing Demands and Structural Importance on Narrative Recall
This study examined the contributions of developmental changes in social-cognitive ability throughout adolescence to the development of narrative comprehension. We measured the effects of sensitivity to the causal structure of narratives and of sensitivity to differences in social-cognitive processing demands on narrative recall by children (8–10 years old), adolescents (13–15 years old), and adults (19–21 years old). Generalized mixed-effects mo…
A Cognitive View of Reading Comprehension
Our aim in the present paper is to discuss a “cognitive view” of reading comprehension, with particular attention to research findings that have the potential to improve our understanding of difficulties in reading comprehension. We provide an overview of how specific sources of difficulties in inference making, executive functions, and attention allocation influence reading comprehension processes and outcomes and may lead to reading comprehensi…
Bridging Reading Comprehension and Conceptual Change in Science Education
The use of texts in science classrooms has waned significantly over the past two decades. However, recently, researchers have shown renewed interest in the use of refutation texts as a tool for promoting conceptual change and science learning. In this article, we examine the intersection of conceptual change and reading comprehension research in science education. We begin by explaining how researchers in conceptual change have turned their inter…
A cognitive account of discourse understanding and discourse interpretation
Text interpretation - the main interest of discourse analysts - is a central component of the text understanding process. In this article we introduce the Landscape Model, which describes the cognitive processes underlying reading comprehension in a detailed and precise manner. Moreover, this model captures the interpretative processes in which the human mind engages during reading. Within the context of the Landscape Model, we describe the relat…
Predicting reading comprehension in early elementary school
The authors examined the development of oral language and decoding skills from preschool to early elementary school and their relation to beginning reading comprehension using a cross-sequential design. Four- and 6-year-old children were tested on oral language and decoding skills and were retested 2 years later. In all age groups, oral language and decoding skills formed distinct clusters. The 2 clusters were related to each other in preschool, …
Revisiting the simple view of reading
Background Reading component models such as the Simple View of Reading (SVR; Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990) provide a concise framework for describing the processes and skills involved when readers comprehend texts. According to the Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading (Rose, 2006) strong evidence for the SVR comes from Factor Analysis of datasets on different measures of reading showing dissociation between decoding s…
Updating Situation Models During Reading of News Reports
Two studies explored the conditions under which readers update their representation of news reports in the presence of alternative plausible explanations for a target event. To do so, this study asked readers to read news reports that mentioned 2 different causes to explain the occurrence of a single event. This study manipulated which of the 2 causes was emphasized at the end of the news report. Experiment 1, through an inference judgment task a…
The Effect of Incentives on Cognitive Processing of Text
This study examines the effect of incentives, a motivational manipulation, on cognitive processes of reading. Extrinsic motivation was manipulated through the use of monetary incentives to assess its effect on information processing in reading. One group of college students was paid for what they remembered from several narrative passages they read, whereas another group of college students was not offered an incentive. Motivated participants had…
The effects of prior knowledge and text structure on comprehension processes during reading of scientific texts
Integrating Memory-Based and Constructionist Processes in Accounts of Reading Comprehension
Memory-based and constructionist processes have both been proposed as essential components of the activation of concepts (e.g., propositions) and the establishment of meaningful connections between concepts during reading. In this article, we argue that a comprehensive theory of reading comprehension should include both sets of processes. In support of this view, we summarize the results of several studies that support the contribution of both pr…
Suppression of Story Character Goals During Reading
The objective of this study was to determine how readers process narrative texts when the main character has multiple, and changing, goals. Readers must keep track of such goals to understand the causal relations between text events, an important process for comprehension. The structure building framework theory of reading proposes that readers maintain the most relevant goal in focus using the mechanism of suppression. The results of this study …
Fluctuations in the Availability of Information During Reading
In this investigation, we examine the availability of text elements over the course of reading a text. We describe the Landscape model (van den Broek, Young, Tzeng, & Linderholm, 1999) that captures, in one theoretical framework, multiple cognitive processes during reading and the resulting fluctuating activations of text elements. To demonstrate the applicability of the Landscape model, we simulate the availability of text elements in two readin…
Sources of Individual Differences in Reading Comprehension and Reading Fluency.
This study examined the common and distinct contributions of context-free and context reading skill to reading comprehension and the contributions of context-free reading skill and reading comprehension to context fluency. The 113 4th-grade participants were measured in reading comprehension, read aloud a folktale, and read aloud the folktale's words in a random list. Fluency was scaled as speed (words read correctly in 1 min) and time (seconds p…
The Mental Representation of Narrative Texts as Networks
The purpose of this study is to determine how the perceived strength of 4 types of causal relations (physical causality, motivation, psychological causation, and enablement) is affected by causal properties (i.e., necessity and sufficiency) and by distance in the text surface structure. Participants evaluated the strength of the relations between pairs of sentences extracted from narratives either without reading the narratives, or with one or tw…
The effects of readers’ goals on inference generation and memory for texts
Logical necessity and transitivity of causal relations in stories
central concern of this study is the problem of identifying inferences that connect units in narrative discourse. A recursive transition network model is described that analyzes and represents a story as a causal network of categorized clauses and labeled relations. Procedural criteria used to identify inferences and the assumptions that inferences operate over distances in the text and are transitive, resulting in a network representation, are t…
Integrating Memory-Based and Constructionist Processes in Accounts of Reading Comprehension
Memory-based and constructionist processes have both been proposed as essential components of the activation of concepts (e.g., propositions) and the establishment of meaningful connections between concepts during reading. In this article, we argue that a comprehensive theory of reading comprehension should include both sets of processes. In support of this view, we summarize the results of several studies that support the contribution of both pr…
Network representations of causal relations in memory for narrative texts
This study investigated how adult readers represent causal relations among events in a narrative. Existing models of text comprehension describe the representation either as a linear chain of text components that are adjacent in the surface structure of the text or as a network that includes relations between nonadjacent as well as adjacent text components. These models were tested in three priming experiments. In each experiment subjects read br…
Cognitive Processes in Discourse Comprehension
As readers move through a text, they engage in various types of processes that, if all goes well, result in a mental representation that captures their interpretation of the text. With each new text segment the reader engages in passive and, at times, reader-initiated processes. These processes are strongly influenced by the readers’ representation of the preceding text and, in turn, update this very same representation. This updated representati…
Bridging Reading Comprehension and Conceptual Change in Science Education
The use of texts in science classrooms has waned significantly over the past two decades. However, recently, researchers have shown renewed interest in the use of refutation texts as a tool for promoting conceptual change and science learning. In this article, we examine the intersection of conceptual change and reading comprehension research in science education. We begin by explaining how researchers in conceptual change have turned their inter…
Causal networks versus goal hierarchies in summarizing text∗
The importance of a statement in a story was investigated, contrasting two alternative approaches to story understanding: hierarchical vs. causal. The importance of a statement was operationalized in terms of the statement's being included in a summary. Goal‐statements across versions of a story were varied in their hierarchical level. In addition, the causal‐chain status and the number of direct causal connections for goal and other statements w…
Revisiting the simple view of reading
Background Reading component models such as the Simple View of Reading (SVR; Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990) provide a concise framework for describing the processes and skills involved when readers comprehend texts. According to the Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading (Rose, 2006) strong evidence for the SVR comes from Factor Analysis of datasets on different measures of reading showing dissociation between decoding s…
Investigations of inferential processes in reading
The study of inferential processes constitutes a major focus of research on text comprehension. Recent research has resulted in interesting and important findings, as exemplified by the contributions in this issue of Discourse Processes. Studies differ substantially, however, in the types of inferences that they consider and in the methodologies that they use. As a result, it is difficult to interpret and integrate the findings. In this article, …
Updating Situation Models During Reading of News Reports
Two studies explored the conditions under which readers update their representation of news reports in the presence of alternative plausible explanations for a target event. To do so, this study asked readers to read news reports that mentioned 2 different causes to explain the occurrence of a single event. This study manipulated which of the 2 causes was emphasized at the end of the news report. Experiment 1, through an inference judgment task a…
Do Teachers Treat Their Students Differently? An Observational Study on Teacher-Student Interactions as a Function of Teacher Expectations and Student Achievement
Through classroom interactions, teachers provide their students with different opportunities to learn. Some kinds of interactions elicit more learning activities than others. With differential treatment of students, teachers may exacerbate or reduce achievement differences in their classroom. In addition, differential interactions may contribute to teacher expectation effects, with teachers treating their high-expectation students more favourably…
Second Language Readers' Memory for Narrative Texts
This study assessed the role that structural properties of texts play in the mental representations of second-language (L2) readers. In particular, we investigated the extent to which 47 L2 readers of English used structural properties of a text (causal factors, story-grammar category, and hierarchical level) to "fill in" gaps in their mental representations. L2 readers' recall protocols of narrative texts were analyzed and compared with those of…
Effects of Social-Cognitive Processing Demands and Structural Importance on Narrative Recall
This study examined the contributions of developmental changes in social-cognitive ability throughout adolescence to the development of narrative comprehension. We measured the effects of sensitivity to the causal structure of narratives and of sensitivity to differences in social-cognitive processing demands on narrative recall by children (8–10 years old), adolescents (13–15 years old), and adults (19–21 years old). Generalized mixed-effects mo…
Fluctuations in the Availability of Information During Reading
In this investigation, we examine the availability of text elements over the course of reading a text. We describe the Landscape model (van den Broek, Young, Tzeng, & Linderholm, 1999) that captures, in one theoretical framework, multiple cognitive processes during reading and the resulting fluctuating activations of text elements. To demonstrate the applicability of the Landscape model, we simulate the availability of text elements in two readin…
Differentiating Text-Based and Knowledge-Based Validation Processes during Reading
To build a coherent accurate mental representation of a text, readers routinely validate information they read against the preceding text and their background knowledge. It is clear that both sources affect processing, but when and how they exert their influence remains unclear. To examine the time course and cognitive architecture of text-based and knowledge-based validation processes, we used eye-tracking methodology. Participants read versions…
The Mental Representation of Narrative Texts as Networks
The purpose of this study is to determine how the perceived strength of 4 types of causal relations (physical causality, motivation, psychological causation, and enablement) is affected by causal properties (i.e., necessity and sufficiency) and by distance in the text surface structure. Participants evaluated the strength of the relations between pairs of sentences extracted from narratives either without reading the narratives, or with one or tw…
Validation
To create a coherent and correct mental representation of a text, readers must validate incoming information; they must monitor information for consistency with the preceding text and their background knowledge. The current study aims to contrast text- and knowledge-based monitoring to investigate their unique influences on processing and whether validation is passive or reader-initiated. Therefore, we collected reading times in a self-paced expe…
Suppression of Story Character Goals During Reading
The objective of this study was to determine how readers process narrative texts when the main character has multiple, and changing, goals. Readers must keep track of such goals to understand the causal relations between text events, an important process for comprehension. The structure building framework theory of reading proposes that readers maintain the most relevant goal in focus using the mechanism of suppression. The results of this study …
A cognitive account of discourse understanding and discourse interpretation
Text interpretation - the main interest of discourse analysts - is a central component of the text understanding process. In this article we introduce the Landscape Model, which describes the cognitive processes underlying reading comprehension in a detailed and precise manner. Moreover, this model captures the interpretative processes in which the human mind engages during reading. Within the context of the Landscape Model, we describe the relat…
Causal thinking and the representation of narrative events
Causal networks versus goal hierarchies in summarizing text∗
The importance of a statement in a story was investigated, contrasting two alternative approaches to story understanding: hierarchical vs. causal. The importance of a statement was operationalized in terms of the statement's being included in a summary. Goal‐statements across versions of a story were varied in their hierarchical level. In addition, the causal‐chain status and the number of direct causal connections for goal and other statements w…
Logical necessity and transitivity of causal relations in stories
central concern of this study is the problem of identifying inferences that connect units in narrative discourse. A recursive transition network model is described that analyzes and represents a story as a causal network of categorized clauses and labeled relations. Procedural criteria used to identify inferences and the assumptions that inferences operate over distances in the text and are transitive, resulting in a network representation, are t…
Analyzing Narratives in Psychotherapy
Narration in psychotherapy has become a key area of theoretical and empiri-cal concern. Rationales for this new concern are provided in the context of introducing a three-dimensional model of narrative structure. Numerous measures corresponding to each dimension are operationally defined and used in an illustrative study of 16 pairs of temporally contiguous child-thera-pist stories sampled from Gardner's (1971) Therapeutic Communication with Chil…
Network representations of causal relations in memory for narrative texts
This study investigated how adult readers represent causal relations among events in a narrative. Existing models of text comprehension describe the representation either as a linear chain of text components that are adjacent in the surface structure of the text or as a network that includes relations between nonadjacent as well as adjacent text components. These models were tested in three priming experiments. In each experiment subjects read br…
Investigations of inferential processes in reading
The study of inferential processes constitutes a major focus of research on text comprehension. Recent research has resulted in interesting and important findings, as exemplified by the contributions in this issue of Discourse Processes. Studies differ substantially, however, in the types of inferences that they consider and in the methodologies that they use. As a result, it is difficult to interpret and integrate the findings. In this article, …
Second Language Readers' Memory for Narrative Texts
This study assessed the role that structural properties of texts play in the mental representations of second-language (L2) readers. In particular, we investigated the extent to which 47 L2 readers of English used structural properties of a text (causal factors, story-grammar category, and hierarchical level) to "fill in" gaps in their mental representations. L2 readers' recall protocols of narrative texts were analyzed and compared with those of…
Using story‐based causal diagrams to analyze disagreements about complex events
People often disagree about the causes of complex events. Previous research has shown that disagreement often results from cognitive and pragmatic constraints that govern people's tendency to attribute outcomes to partial rather than complete causes. This article applies the Trabasso, van den Broek, and Suh (1989) story‐based procedures to a narrative of the 1987 stock market crash. The content and structure of the resulting causal diagrams are t…
The effects of readers’ goals on inference generation and memory for texts
The Mental Representation of Narrative Texts as Networks
The purpose of this study is to determine how the perceived strength of 4 types of causal relations (physical causality, motivation, psychological causation, and enablement) is affected by causal properties (i.e., necessity and sufficiency) and by distance in the text surface structure. Participants evaluated the strength of the relations between pairs of sentences extracted from narratives either without reading the narratives, or with one or tw…
Sources of Individual Differences in Reading Comprehension and Reading Fluency.
This study examined the common and distinct contributions of context-free and context reading skill to reading comprehension and the contributions of context-free reading skill and reading comprehension to context fluency. The 113 4th-grade participants were measured in reading comprehension, read aloud a folktale, and read aloud the folktale's words in a random list. Fluency was scaled as speed (words read correctly in 1 min) and time (seconds p…
Suppression of Story Character Goals During Reading
The objective of this study was to determine how readers process narrative texts when the main character has multiple, and changing, goals. Readers must keep track of such goals to understand the causal relations between text events, an important process for comprehension. The structure building framework theory of reading proposes that readers maintain the most relevant goal in focus using the mechanism of suppression. The results of this study …
Fluctuations in the Availability of Information During Reading
In this investigation, we examine the availability of text elements over the course of reading a text. We describe the Landscape model (van den Broek, Young, Tzeng, & Linderholm, 1999) that captures, in one theoretical framework, multiple cognitive processes during reading and the resulting fluctuating activations of text elements. To demonstrate the applicability of the Landscape model, we simulate the availability of text elements in two readin…
Integrating Memory-Based and Constructionist Processes in Accounts of Reading Comprehension
Memory-based and constructionist processes have both been proposed as essential components of the activation of concepts (e.g., propositions) and the establishment of meaningful connections between concepts during reading. In this article, we argue that a comprehensive theory of reading comprehension should include both sets of processes. In support of this view, we summarize the results of several studies that support the contribution of both pr…
The effects of prior knowledge and text structure on comprehension processes during reading of scientific texts
Updating Situation Models During Reading of News Reports
Two studies explored the conditions under which readers update their representation of news reports in the presence of alternative plausible explanations for a target event. To do so, this study asked readers to read news reports that mentioned 2 different causes to explain the occurrence of a single event. This study manipulated which of the 2 causes was emphasized at the end of the news report. Experiment 1, through an inference judgment task a…
The Effect of Incentives on Cognitive Processing of Text
This study examines the effect of incentives, a motivational manipulation, on cognitive processes of reading. Extrinsic motivation was manipulated through the use of monetary incentives to assess its effect on information processing in reading. One group of college students was paid for what they remembered from several narrative passages they read, whereas another group of college students was not offered an incentive. Motivated participants had…
Predicting reading comprehension in early elementary school
The authors examined the development of oral language and decoding skills from preschool to early elementary school and their relation to beginning reading comprehension using a cross-sequential design. Four- and 6-year-old children were tested on oral language and decoding skills and were retested 2 years later. In all age groups, oral language and decoding skills formed distinct clusters. The 2 clusters were related to each other in preschool, …
Revisiting the simple view of reading
Background Reading component models such as the Simple View of Reading (SVR; Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990) provide a concise framework for describing the processes and skills involved when readers comprehend texts. According to the Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading (Rose, 2006) strong evidence for the SVR comes from Factor Analysis of datasets on different measures of reading showing dissociation between decoding s…
Bridging Reading Comprehension and Conceptual Change in Science Education
The use of texts in science classrooms has waned significantly over the past two decades. However, recently, researchers have shown renewed interest in the use of refutation texts as a tool for promoting conceptual change and science learning. In this article, we examine the intersection of conceptual change and reading comprehension research in science education. We begin by explaining how researchers in conceptual change have turned their inter…
A cognitive account of discourse understanding and discourse interpretation
Text interpretation - the main interest of discourse analysts - is a central component of the text understanding process. In this article we introduce the Landscape Model, which describes the cognitive processes underlying reading comprehension in a detailed and precise manner. Moreover, this model captures the interpretative processes in which the human mind engages during reading. Within the context of the Landscape Model, we describe the relat…
A Cognitive View of Reading Comprehension
Our aim in the present paper is to discuss a “cognitive view” of reading comprehension, with particular attention to research findings that have the potential to improve our understanding of difficulties in reading comprehension. We provide an overview of how specific sources of difficulties in inference making, executive functions, and attention allocation influence reading comprehension processes and outcomes and may lead to reading comprehensi…
Effects of Social-Cognitive Processing Demands and Structural Importance on Narrative Recall
This study examined the contributions of developmental changes in social-cognitive ability throughout adolescence to the development of narrative comprehension. We measured the effects of sensitivity to the causal structure of narratives and of sensitivity to differences in social-cognitive processing demands on narrative recall by children (8–10 years old), adolescents (13–15 years old), and adults (19–21 years old). Generalized mixed-effects mo…
Cognitive Processes in Discourse Comprehension
As readers move through a text, they engage in various types of processes that, if all goes well, result in a mental representation that captures their interpretation of the text. With each new text segment the reader engages in passive and, at times, reader-initiated processes. These processes are strongly influenced by the readers’ representation of the preceding text and, in turn, update this very same representation. This updated representati…
Peer feedback on academic writing
Within the higher education context, peer feedback is frequently applied as an instructional method. Research on the learning mechanisms involved in the peer feedback process has covered aspects of both providing and receiving feedback. However, a direct comparison of the impact that providing and receiving peer feedback has on students’ writing performance is still lacking. The current study compared the writing performance of undergraduate stud…
Psychology (32 works) · Linguistics (27 works) · Computer Science (24 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (23 works) · Cognitive psychology (22 works) · Comprehension (18 works) · Educational Strategies and Epistemologies (16 works) · Reading comprehension (15 works) · Cognition (14 works) · Artificial Intelligence (10 works)