Science of Reading: The Podcast

S10 E4: The science of memory and misinformation, with David Rapp, Ph.D.

• Amplify Education • Season 10 • Episode 4

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In this episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Susan Lambert is joined by Northwestern University Professor of Education, Social Policy, and Psychology David Rapp. David’s research focuses on language and memory, and his conversation with Susan gives insight into how memory is connected to comprehension. The first half of the episode is spent defining comprehension as a process, a product, and a higher-order cognitive process. David then digs into how that definition informs the ways in which educators assess comprehension and where they can look for potential failure points. One of these failure points includes misinformation. David addresses what happens when misinformation is stored in long-term memory. He details the issues this can cause for student comprehension, and he gives guidance on how to prevent and correct them.

Show notes:

Quotes: 

“Once the information is in memory, you can't really get rid of it. What you can try to do is make other memories more powerful, more likely to resonate to things.” —David Rapp, Ph.D.

“Sometimes our most effective processes actually lead us to misunderstand. For example, you're really good at encoding information to memory, that's great, except if you're exposed to inaccurate ideas, that's a problem.” —David Rapp, Ph.D.

“It feels easy for us to comprehend texts if we're well practiced at it, it feels easy, but it's actually a lot of cognitive operations going on behind the scenes and a lot of years of practice.” —David Rapp, Ph.D.

“In terms of being exposed to misinformation, we see even if people have been exposed to inaccurate ideas, even once, it's encoded into memory, it's potentially gonna be there to influence you.” —David Rapp, Ph.D.

Episode Timestamps
02:00 Introduction: Who is David Rapp?
04:00 Defining reading comprehension
05:00 Comprehension as a process vs a product
08:00 Comprehension as a higher order cognitive process
12:00 Coherence
18:00 Memory activation and misinformation
21:00 Consequences of misinformation
25:00 Correcting misinformation
28:00 Preventing misinformation
36:00 The evolution of thinking on comprehension
40:00 Current research
45:00 Closing thoughts and encouragement to dig into research
*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute

[00:00:00] David Rapp: It feels easy for us to comprehend texts if we're well-practiced, then it feels easy, but it's actually a lot of cognitive operations going on behind the scenes.

[00:00:13] Susan Lambert: This is Susan Lambert and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. Today we continue our Season 10 deep dive into comprehension by examining two key topics. First, we're going to explore the cognitive processes underlying comprehension. Then we're also going to look into the consequences of incorrect information and the lasting impact incorrect information can have on comprehension.

Before I introduce today's guest, let me remind you to submit your own questions about comprehension at amplify.com/SORmailbag. And now my guest for these weighty topics is Dr. David N. Rapp, the Walter Dill Scott Professor of Education, social policy and psychology at Northwestern University.

I think his official bio sums up his work nicely: Dr. Rapp's research examines language and memory focusing on the cognitive mechanisms responsible for successful learning and for knowledge failures. I can't wait to dive into all of that, plus, Spider-Man, right now with Dr. David Rapp.

Dr. David Rapp, thank you so much for joining us on today's episode. We're glad to have you here.

[00:01:32] David Rapp: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk about reading and comprehension and misinformation.

[00:01:37] Susan Lambert: Ah, very exciting. I love that topic of misinformation. But before we get there, I would love if you could introduce yourself to our listeners and maybe talk a little bit about how you became interested in comprehension.

[00:01:49] David Rapp: Sure. My name's David Rapp. I'm a professor of psychology and education at Northwestern University. I've been at Northwestern for almost 20 years now. I can't believe it.

[00:01:58] Susan Lambert: Wow!

[00:01:58] David Rapp: Um, yeah, it's been a long time. Growing up as a kid, I used to work in libraries. I loved libraries and I loved reading, so it was always an interest I had. I just would read voraciously nonstop. And then at some point in college I started getting involved in psychology research and I found it really interesting. And I discovered that I could actually study how people read and how they think. And I became enamored with that and it led to me to go into graduate school and postdocs and faculty positions and doing the kind of research I do today. So it's all due to libraries and reading.

[00:02:27] Susan Lambert: That's so awesome. I think this is the first time we've heard that story about a love to go to libraries, and one of the reasons I got interested in literacy was my dad did the same thing. Took me to the library all the time. Such good memories of being there and smelling the books and holding the books in, in your hand.

[00:02:45] David Rapp: I have the same memories, and even now to this day, there'll be days I'll just not come into work and I'll go find a library in the area and just check it out and wander the stacks, and then sit down and do some writing, do some reading, see what book just pulls me in.

[00:02:59] Susan Lambert: That sounds great. Well, our focus is on reading comprehension for this season—one of the reasons we wanted to have you on—and I really would love it if you could provide your definition of reading comprehension.

[00:03:12] David Rapp: Sure, yeah. By reading comprehension, my definition would be, people's ability to take up information that's presented in written form, to think deeply about it, and potentially apply it in settings in which it's necessary.

So that could mean anything from reading directions of a recipe, reading a textbook to learn about how the mind works or how the body works or about theories of philosophy, or what have you. It could mean, um, reading the newspaper and learning something about contemporary issues and then talking about that with friends and colleagues, maybe making voting decisions based on those ideas, maybe trying to convince others of ideas.

It could mean reading fiction and learning something from fiction and using that to inspire your own writing or to think about the world differently after you read Anna Karenina, or after you read, you know, the most popular books that are on the New York Times bestsellers. So for me, reading comprehension means taking up ideas, having them in memory, and being able to use them later, specifically as presented through the written form.

[00:04:12] Susan Lambert: Hmm. Wow. Really broad. That uh, that reminds me that comprehension is a really broad topic, and we've been talking a lot about that on this season and even prior too. We also talk a little bit about comprehension as both process and product, and I know you address that too. Can you explain the difference between that? Comprehension process and comprehension as product?

[00:04:34] David Rapp: For sure. And that's such a critical component of the research we do in my lab. Um, so by process we mean the actual activities that are going on as you read. And by that we usually referring to cognitive processes. You could think about them as things going on in your brain.

[00:04:48] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:04:48] David Rapp: But we think about them as things going on in your mind, by which I mean the memories that you're creating, the attention that you're applying. Um, the information that you're focusing on, your attempts to decode words and sounds into language, your attempts to understand what the themes are in a sequence of words that are suggesting some set of ideas, you're thinking about whether those ideas are valid or not.

So the process would be, what's going on as you're reading; the product is what remains after that experience is ostensibly completed. After it's done. So, after I read a book or after I read an article or after I, you know, talk with friends, whatever discourse experience we have— I focus on reading—but whatever experience we have, what remains after that? What do I remember? What am I going to use later to think about the world? Um. It's interesting from a researcher's perspective, because we'd love to know a lot about process, but it's really hard to get at what's going on in the moment as someone reads a blog post or looks at a newspaper or, you know, consults a menu at a restaurant.

It's hard to know what's going on and it's easier to know what they remember afterwards. because you can just ask them.

[00:05:54] Susan Lambert: Right, right.

[00:05:55] David Rapp: This is the kind of thing that a lot of people will relate to in thinking about how teachers think about reading. Teachers often want to know, what are the kids doing as they're reading? What are my students doing? What are their processes? But the tools they have at hand are the tests they give after a kid read something or the report a student writes, which are the products. So the trick is figuring out ways to understand process, what's going on in the moment as you're attempting to comprehend something, by looking at what people have actually demonstrated they know.

[00:06:25] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm

[00:06:25] David Rapp: The product, after it's done.

[00:06:26] Susan Lambert: Complicated. Very complicated.

[00:06:29] David Rapp: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, in the best... some of your listeners might have heard of MRIs, fMRIs, where you look at blood moving in the brain.

[00:06:37] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:06:37] David Rapp: That's a kind of neuroscientific biological process. Where's the blood going in the brain as someone reads?

[00:06:41] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:42] David Rapp: You know? But also you could be interested in what ideas are being activated as you're reading, and how would you know that we can't look at an X-ray?

[00:06:48] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:06:48] David Rapp: So maybe we have to ask people what they're thinking as they're reading, or maybe we have to design clever experiments—hopefully, we can do that—to get at those ideas. Because the product part is easier. What do you remember? After they listen to this podcast? What do you remember? That's the product of that comprehension activity.

[00:07:02] Susan Lambert: Yeah, that's a great connection too. And wouldn't I love as a podcast host to know what you're thinking about during the process of this, of this conversation?

[00:07:11] David Rapp: For sure. And the advertisers would love to know what's going on along the way too. So not just us. I think everyone would love to know, right? When you're talking to loved ones, you want to know what they're thinking. They'll tell you at the end, and maybe some of that's informed by what you said, and maybe it's stuff they're just coming up with on the fly. So I think everyone would love to get at that. So it's really an important issue, both theoretically, but you know, practically.

[00:07:31] Susan Lambert: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Such a good, such a good comment. You also refer to comprehension as a higher order cognitive process. Right? And um, I talk about that a little bit too. But I'd love to hear from your point of view as an expert, what does that actually mean, that it's a higher order cognitive process?

[00:07:46] David Rapp: Sure. There's a couple different ways to think about it. One way some people think about it is, higher order means something that's complicated and only certain kind of creatures can do it, like human beings.

[00:07:56] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:56] David Rapp: So, sure some animals can comprehend things, right? Your neighbor's dog can comprehend when you come outside with a treat, comes running.

But, but, you know, comprehending text and words and ideas is much more complicated. And being able to generate new ideas and write new things and come up with new inferences that haven't been provided before. That's complicated. So, one way to think about it is higher order means something that really humans can do versus other kinds of creatures.

Another way to think about it is, there are lots of different activities and processes that support our reading. Like when we read a sentence, we identify letters and we know how those letters sound, and then we think about how those letters go together to sound like words and how the words go together to make sentences.

Each of those steps requires us to do something a little more complicated from identifying a letter to knowing what a word means. So higher order there means on a spectrum of how complicated the activity is, comprehension, the kind of comprehension I'm interested in, is this higher order—figuring out what themes are in texts or how words go together or why we appreciate a poem is much different than being able to identify, uh, a set of, you know, ink colors as the letter B, or knowing that the pixels on a screen are the word, "the." So by higher order, I mean a complicated set of activities that might feel easy, but actually require a lot of cognitive activity, like again, attention inferencing, prior knowledge activation, thinking about what ideas mean. So when you read a book, when you're reading a novel, when you're reading a newspaper, that's a pretty complicated thing to do. It takes a lot of practice. It feels easy, but we're really good at it, after, you know, years of schooling and practice and spending time in libraries or whatever, you know, wherever you're going to do your reading. So higher order for me means something that's more complicated, some other sets of processes that involves lots of processes coalescing into something.

[00:09:47] Susan Lambert: Mmmm.

[00:09:48] David Rapp: And that requires some practice. Hopefully, that makes sense.

[00:09:50] Susan Lambert: It does make sense. And I, I love how you said lots of, lots of these processes sort of coalescing together. It makes me think about all the different kind of models that we use to try to unpack and understand, um, reading, the process of reading and reading comprehension. But it also is a great reminder that, like, you have to be good and automatic at this idea of sounds, letter, word level, before you can, or even sentence level, before you can even get to these other places. Is that right?

[00:10:22] David Rapp: Yeah, that makes total sense. You know, I hear a lot of my teacher friends tell me, um, you know, "Up until certain grade," some say fourth grade, "you know, the students, the kids are learning to read and then afterwards they're reading to learn."

So it's this shift from, like you described, understanding what letters are, understanding what sounds are, being able to put those letters together to form words, maybe knowing the basic ideas of what particular words are. And going from there to understanding what were authors' intentions when they wrote something.

What's the main theme of this text? Is it being persuasive? If I had to rewrite it, what would I change to make it an even better text? What do I appreciate about these sentences? What does this tell me about the world? Can I take away any, you know, allegorical understandings? Are there themes everyone remembers, maybe in high school, when you had to read a text and apply some framework to understand what the author intended? That's a higher order thing. So to revisit that higher or lower order, it's not meant to sort of say one is better than the other.

[00:11:18] Susan Lambert: Right, right.

[00:11:18] David Rapp: It's just saying, right, that high order requires a lot of these processes to operate successfully.

Look, understanding letters requires a lot of processes too. Attention, vision, um, but it's just a different way of thinking about letters versus meaning of texts. So a very different way.

[00:11:34] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. That, that's a really great segue into the next thing that I wanted to talk to you about, which is this idea of coherence because we hear coherence is so important in comprehension.

Um, are you a coherent reader or can you make connections between ideas and sentences and overall text? But I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what you think coherence looks like in its relationship to comprehension?

[00:12:00] David Rapp: Sure. Um, folks in my neck of the woods who do research on higher order reading comprehension and memory, um, think about coherence in at least two ways.

So I'll describe two. There might be more.

[00:12:10] Susan Lambert: Okay, great.

[00:12:10] David Rapp: One way they talk about it is, if a text's coherent, meaning the ideas seem to flow one to the next, so if you read a sentence and you have an expectation of what the next sentence is going to be, or the ideas that are going to continue. And that plays out, that's coherence.

That text was coherent. It made sense, it flowed, it had a logical consistency. One idea led to the next. I can follow it. Often when you read a text, you know when there's a coherence break, if the idea shifts, the author changes. Sometimes this happens with me, where I read and like, I've got to go back and read that whole paragraph. I'm not sure where I lost the, the thread, right?

[00:12:44] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yep, yep.

[00:12:44] David Rapp: So that's one way of thinking about coherence is it's, it's a feature of a text or a written product. Another way to think about it is, what are my understandings like? Are my understandings coherent? So if you ask me, for example, to explain why the seasons change, I'm going to give you a pretty poor explanation because it's not something I've studied in a long time.

My ideas are sort of all over the place. They're kind of willy-nilly. Um. They're not coherent. They don't have a logical, clear, consistent set of understandings to potentially explain that. Now, one of my hobbies is I love Spider-Man. I read everything I can about Spider-Man. I've been reading Spider-Man since I'm, you know, a little kid.

[00:13:24] Susan Lambert: Oh, and not to interrupt you, but I'm going to, because for our listeners, you get Spider-Man right there in your background.

[00:13:30] David Rapp: So yeah, I'm kind of a nut. I grew up in Queens, New York, near where Peter Parker grew up. So it's, it's kind of a thing.

[00:13:36] Susan Lambert: That's fun.

[00:13:38] David Rapp: But, so I have a real coherent, it's not very useful other than trivia, right? But I have this coherent understanding of Spider-Man, where I can explain a lot of his reasonings for doing things, how the character developed. I can tell you a little bit about how the authors who wrote about him and the artists who developed him, and what contemporary views are like about it. So I have a much more enriched, clear, coherent set of explanations that I can bring to bear. Probably because my memories and what we call the representations, that's just a nerdy way of saying the traces we've, we've stored in memory, are coherent. They're logically organized. I can retrieve them and call upon them in a clear way.

So, if students, people have coherent understandings, they can make interesting logical leaps, they can make interesting inferences, they have clear understandings that they can demonstrate. So like a clear text, you want people's understandings to also be clear and consistent. By the way, you'll notice I didn't say correct.

[00:14:32] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:14:32] David Rapp: I can have a coherent understanding of the world that's totally wrong. Maybe my understanding of how and why the seasons change is based on, "I think that it's due to the sun coming and going." Right? And I have a logical explanation, but it turns out to be totally wrong. So coherent means for the individual, logical and coherent, but based on some objective standard, it could be wrong.

[00:14:52] Susan Lambert: Oh, that's so interesting. So I, I think I have this right, so help me if, if I don't.

[00:14:56] David Rapp: Sure.

[00:14:56] Susan Lambert: If I'm reading something about Spider-Man and you're reading something about Spider-Man, you have way more experience and knowledge with that, like an interest with that.

And so I'm guessing that you are going to be able to make, or you are going to have a deeper level of comprehension with that topic or that idea, whether you're hearing about it or listening to it, than I might have. Is that right?

[00:15:16] David Rapp: I think that's true, and there's a couple reasons for that. One is I'll have a base of prior knowledge to which I can apply and contribute to as I'm learning new things. Um, probably having all that experience with it makes me more confident about talking about it. So I'm probably more willing to divulge and talk about things. And the interest part is really important. Being interested in the topic makes me want to seek out or assess different kinds of ideas.

I've been kind of funny about the Spider-Man idea, but this is also true for anybody's hobbies and interests, right? You'll have an area that you're expert in, whether it's a hobby like sewing or a career, like being a, a heart surgeon, or whatever it is. If you're expert in that space, your knowledge is going to be much more clear. It's going to be much more coherent. You're going to be able to understand problems, uh, assess them and talk about them more quickly and probably in more detail. And anyone can get to that space. They just need to practice a lot, learn a lot, go through a lot of training. There are a bunch of researchers who say it takes, you know, some subset number of hours to become an expert, whatever that number might be. It takes time.

[00:16:18] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:16:18] David Rapp: So that you can build those coherent understandings. So, the goal is to help people be able to understand information even when they're not expert in efforts for them to build those coherent understandings and, and be able to apply that knowledge in lots of settings. Hopefully not just when, you know, you happen to be on Jeopardy, which I haven't been, and someone asked you about Spider-Man, which is the dream. But, but, or, or to be on a podcast and someone happens to ask. But again, it's about, you know, can you build understandings based on reading information and how easily do you discern what's correct, what's not? How easily do you think about, how deeply do you think about those ideas? Those are the kinds of issues that matter and are influenced by how much you know.

[00:16:56] Susan Lambert: All right, so now I'm going to ask you about, what about the things that you know? What if they're incorrect? And we had, um, Reid Smith on recently. He talked a little bit about this idea of misconception or incorrect information in long-term memory. And we'd love to play this audio clip for you and, and then have you respond.

[00:17:20] David Rapp: Yeah, I'd love to hear it.

[00:17:21] Susan Lambert: All right.

[00:17:21] Reid Smith: Long-term memory makes no distinction between information that's correct or incorrect. It's just information and knowledge and it gets recalled in the same way and integrated with the text in exactly the same way.

So of, of course, the incorrect knowledge would impact our understanding, and that impacts the readers who are less confident and less able readers more than the stronger readers because they're less able to identify inconsistencies in the text.

[00:17:50] David Rapp: Yeah. Uh, you know, I totally agree with Reid, what Reid is describing, and I can talk a little bit about it in a way that might be informative.

[00:17:57] Susan Lambert: Oh, please. Yeah. Yes, please do.

[00:17:58] David Rapp: So imagine a case where you have lots of, well, we don't have to imagine, it's true. We have lots of ideas stored in memory, and someone asks us a question. That's going to cue or activate those concepts we have in memory. Now it turns out there are a variety of models.

One's called the resonance model of comprehension that suggests when someone asks a question, lots of ideas get activated automatically in memory. So if you were to ask me a question about Northwestern University, lots of concepts I have activated in about Northwestern become activated. Regardless of whether they're accurate or not, all of the related concepts in memory are being activated.

[00:18:34] Susan Lambert: Wow.

[00:18:34] David Rapp: So you can see how that might be a problem because the hope would be, I have activated correct information, but everything resonance, this idea that related memories are resonating in response to what someone asks, and regardless of whether they're accurate or not, in fact, the folks who initiated the resonance model includes Ed O'Brien and Jerry Myers, used to say the process is dumb, by which they mean it doesn't discern between what's correct or not because it's automatic.

[00:19:02] Susan Lambert: Oh, got it.

[00:19:02] David Rapp: So it's only after all those concepts get activated, they're now fodder for you to use to make decisions, talk about with somebody else. So now somehow, strategically I'm picking what's right or not, or I'm using that information. We don't know a lot about how that actually works, but, but at least some accounts say I'm picking things that were most recently mentioned that have the greatest activation, that seem to be most relevant, and if they're accurate, that's great. And if they're inaccurate, there's problems there. So unless I as a person have tagged every single memory I have as correct or not, which is way more work than you want to do.

[00:19:40] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:19:40] David Rapp: And probably not feasible. Most information that you've got encoded that's relevant is going to be retrieved. And some of that could be wrong.

So the upshot is there's lots of opportunity for people to make mistakes. Sometimes based on poor judgments, but sometimes based on just the way our cognitive system operates, um, during comprehension.

[00:20:01] Susan Lambert: It's a little scary actually to me while I'm thinking back to being a, you know, a teacher in the classroom and what kind of misinformation did I present in a classroom that might still be lasting with my students now? But that's a whole other conversation.

[00:20:13] David Rapp: Oh boy. I'm with you.

[00:20:13] Susan Lambert: What, what about the consequences of this misinformation for a reader specifically?

[00:20:19] David Rapp: Sure. This is where a lot of our work over the last 10, 15 years has moved into thinking about, because I was really always interested in, how are people generating inferences and understanding the world after they read text fiction or nonfiction?

Uh. And along the way, um, the early 2000s, started to think about, "Well, a lot of what we read isn't necessarily correct." Some of this came from thinking about reading fiction novels. So one of my favorite cases was, I would read Jurassic Park, and Michael Crichton is a great author, doctor who was writing about medical procedures and science that I didn't know anything about. So maybe it's true, maybe we can make dinosaurs from mosquitoes stored in amber. You know, I, I know that's not true now, but as I'm reading, I don't know what might be true and what might not be true. And that made me think about, "Okay, there's lots of cases where unintentionally we're exposed to misinformation."

Like I don't think Crichton is trying to fool you into believing we could recreate dinosaurs. He's trying to write a fun story. But over the time there's been lots of cases where instances of disinformation and people, you know, making mistakes in news reports, which happens all the time, can influence our understanding.

So I became interested in, how does the misinformation we're exposed to influence our understandings, and as you can imagine, related to those resonance models, thinking about, "Okay, if I encode, meaning get an idea into memory and it's wrong, it's there potentially to be used later."

[00:21:40] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:21:40] David Rapp: So a lot of our work now is trying to understand, what are the consequences of exposures to inaccurate information?

And then if we understand that, can we figure out ways to help people become more critical evaluators so they don't fall victim to the errant things that they read? So on the first side, in terms of being exposed to misinformation, we see, even if people have been exposed to an accurate idea, even once, if it's encoded into memory, it's potentially going to be there to influence you. We have this accountant that talks about what the negative consequences are, and there's three kinds of negative consequences I can talk about briefly. One is, after people have read inaccurate ideas, they could be confused about what they know and what they think is true. So if I know a lot about a topic and then I read something that's wrong. I might start to become confused about what I think might be right or not.

[00:22:30] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:30] David Rapp: A second thing, which is a real concern now in a lot of information spaces including social media, is if you read misinformation, you might start to wonder, can I trust these particular sources or which sources can I trust?

So there's a lot of work looking at when people read about climate change issues from different sources and different ideas get conveyed, true or not, it might lead people to think, "Well, no one really knows what's right. So no one has a good sense. So I'm going to, you know, the jury's out for me. I don't know if it's a thing or not."

So they're starting to question the validity of sources, whether they're scientists, blog producers, podcast, whatever it is. So that's the second potential consequence. The third one, the one that we're most interested in my lab is, people's use of that misinformation. So if you encode those ideas into memory, like I said, they can become reactivated. They're bouncing around. You could make mistakes. We have lots of studies in the lab. I'll give you an example of one. We have one where we'll have people read texts that contain potential inaccurate ideas, things like the capitol of Illinois, Chicago. And then later people will, you know, they'll read a bunch of these texts containing accurate ideas and inaccurate ideas, and then they'll do a little distractor so they won't keep thinking about the stories.

[00:23:42] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:23:43] David Rapp: And then afterwards we give them a questionnaire that has a bunch of questions, kind of like a trivia quiz. And some people love this. They're like, "Oh, I get to do the trivia quiz!" And there'll be questions. Lo and behold, there'll be a question like, what's the capitol of Illinois? And we see people who are exposed to inaccurate ideas sometimes use that information to answer the questions, even when they should know better. Even if they grew up in Chicago and they know the capitol is Springfield, they'll make those mistakes. So of course, if people don't know what the capitol is, it's not a mistake necessarily, that like learning something and they don't know it's wrong. But sometimes people will make mistakes when they should know better.

Again, that information being available and active means it's fodder for being produced later. So for us that's, that's one example. We have lots of other kinds of examples where exposures to misinformation lead to problems downstream.

[00:24:29] Susan Lambert: How is it, so is it possible then, it probably is possible to correct this misinformation, but this is a really big question and I'm specifically thinking about what implications this might have for teachers in the classroom specifically. Right? Like we're, we're sort of in the K-8 space, but ...

[00:24:45] David Rapp: Right.

[00:24:45] Susan Lambert: Can we correct that information and what does it take to correct misinformation?

[00:24:50] David Rapp: We can. It turns out to be really hard because some of the prevailing accounts in cognitive science and cognitive psych and educational psychology have said, once the information is in memory, you can't really get rid of it.

What you can try to do is make other memories more powerful, more redolent, more likely to resonate in response to things. So if I've encoded the idea that Chicago's the capitol of Illinois, I'll need someone else to tell me over and over again that Springfield is the capitol. I'll need to have lots of experiences so when someone asks me what's the capitol of Illinois, I'm more likely to retrieve the correct idea than the incorrect idea. So overcoming misinformation can be tricky because once it's in long-term memory...

[00:25:34] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:25:35] David Rapp: It's there. When we present someone with an idea briefly, they could use it, but it might not make it into long-term memory. But once it's in long-term memory. Yeah, then you kind of have to reckon with it. So there's lots of techniques and attempts and procedures people try to design, like have people slow down when they're reading or generating answers, so don't let those immediate activated ideas be what wins out.

[00:25:58] Susan Lambert: Hmm.

[00:25:59] David Rapp: Really contemplate and evaluate, which is hard, right? And I'm sitting on Twitter or any social media, I'm kind of doom scrolling in the morning before I go to work, and I'm not like slowly cogitating about all the ideas. So I have to force myself to do that, to remember what's correct and what's not. Um. There's a bunch of researchers who are doing really great work looking at, how can you design texts to raise up the availability and the focus on the correct ideas and downplay and reject the inaccurate ones so people are better able to, I mentioned this before, tag what's correct or not?

So at least when the ideas are reactivated, it's sort of tagged and you can be, "Oh, I, that idea is, I know it's wrong."

[00:26:38] Susan Lambert: Hmm.

[00:26:38] David Rapp: So even though I'm thinking about it, I know it's wrong.

[00:26:40] Susan Lambert: Yeah. it seems to me, so again, thinking about me, um, as a former third grade teacher and trying to help my students gain new knowledge about any topic, right?

And, um, one thing I think that we know is that the knowledge that you have about a text, when you bring that to another text you're reading, the better able you are to comprehend. But it seems to me that there is a danger then, if I have some misinformation, especially as a young student, trying to bring it to a text where I might not be able to sort of square this information up with what I knew before. And so, how in the world can we like think about preventing that misinformation, particularly in these younger grades, so that we're not actually building and building and building misinformation.

[00:27:33] David Rapp: Right. Yeah. There's, there's a bunch of ways to think about it. One, which I don't think is practical is avoid exposure to the inaccurate ideas.

[00:27:40] Susan Lambert: No!

[00:27:40] David Rapp: I don't know how you do that. Right? You know, I have the students in my college classes, the kids that I see in schools when I'm doing research. I can't say like, "Hey, listen, when you go home, don't look at anything else except... right? That's not going to work. Um. But things you can do, there's lots of researchers who've done really interesting work showing that if you can teach kids literacy practices, like digital or media literacy practices, where they think about, "Okay, when I see some information, who's the source? Where is it coming from? Is it consistent with other things that I've read? Let me look, let me do lateral reading and see if there's other sources that confirm these ideas."

[00:28:15] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:15] David Rapp: If you do that regularly, it doesn't mean all the time, but if you do that regularly, you become a better consumer of information because you're going to think more deeply about it.

So in that case, if you can encourage those practices in students, then the hope is they'll take that up and utilize those practices in other things you might do with them. Now, it's not a, it's not a magic thing that's going to happen, right? It's like a, it's not waving the wand.

[00:28:36] Susan Lambert: Sure.

[00:28:36] David Rapp: But at least it's different from worrying about, what facts am I going to teach and what facts am I going to worry whether my students know?

So here's an example that I think a lot of teachers relate to. Maybe I say to my class when I'm teaching something, "Has anyone ever heard of this thing? It's wrong." That's kind of a problem because now I've introduced the wrong idea and maybe some students have never heard it before, so now I've encouraged them to think about it.

[00:29:00] Susan Lambert: Oh yeah.

[00:29:00] David Rapp: So it gets tricky and, and it's a lot of responsibility, right? For teachers to have to worry about, "What can I present? What can I present, which students know what before I go into class?"

[00:29:08] Susan Lambert: Yeah, yeah.

[00:29:08] David Rapp: It's something we'd all love to do. So I think a lot of it is about, can I teach and encourage literacy practices that are about evaluating information? That the belief that evaluating information is a responsibility and something that's important, and it's going to help me comprehend the world better. And it's not hard to do because I have the internet at my fingertips. And if I look at, you know, appropriate sources, and I do this in a well practice way, I have resources behind me to do this. If I stop and contemplate things and think deeply about, does this connect with what I know in a relevant way? If not, what's discrepant about this? Doing those kinds of practices, which I think, it's not just reading researchers who want to do that, STEM researchers want to do that, right?

[00:29:50] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:29:50] David Rapp: If we can encourage that, I think we'll have more success. So that's something to recommend. It's not a magic thing though, right? So teachers are probably saying, "Yeah, I get it, but how do I do that?" And that's, that's the hard part that people are trying to figure out.

[00:30:01] Susan Lambert: It is, but you know what it does, it takes me back to the library.

It takes me back to the library. And, um, when I got interested in the topic, what my dad used to do is not, and this was when I was a little, little girl, right? He didn't necessarily take me to the kids' section to find information on that topic, but he would take me to, you know, the more adult section to find books on that. And very often we would check out more than one text, right? So it would be multiple books on the same topic. I know we have K-8 standards that talk about making sure kids are comparing and contrasting two texts on, or three texts on the same topic. So this sort of gets at this idea of, compare these ideas and what you're learning from these texts to see if they both square similarly. Does that sound right?

[00:30:50] David Rapp: I think so. And I think that that's in line with a lot of the practices we hope people would use in a variety of diverse reading settings, right? When people are online reading news, we hope they're going to look at multiple news sources to find confirmation or disconfirmation of things that are being presented when they read social media, that they're not just relying on one or two users. In fact, they're relying on tons of users. And it's right at your fingertips to check. Uh. When you're trying to understand something, you look for multiple sources, not just a single one. The problem is, you know, some researchers and practitioners and lay people will say, "Well, that's a lot of work." And for sure it is.

But I think we could encourage in people responsibility that, you know, if I really want to understand the world and I really want to do a good job of understanding things, I need to take a little bit of time and think about it and look up multiple sources, you know. Earlier, you'd asked about, um, something about like experts, right?

[00:31:42] Susan Lambert: Right. Yeah.

[00:31:42] David Rapp: Do experts have more knowledge? And experts are really good at discerning what's a disconnect, where there's a discrepancy, where things are inconsistent. And that comes with practice. So encouraging those practices, it's not like a magic thing that some of the experts can do and that's what makes them scientists or, you know, or reading researchers or, or your really fun neighbor. It's about, what kind of things can I rehearse and do over and over again, so it becomes solo practice that I detect those discrepancies? When I hear someone saying something. "Well, that's not consistent with the previous thing. Let me try to figure out why it's not coherent."

[00:32:15] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:32:15] David Rapp: Right?

[00:32:15] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:32:16] David Rapp: And what, what your dad did is awesome because it inculcates the idea that multiple sources together can tell me something useful.

And maybe that's something that you've thought about and as part of your everyday practice now.

[00:32:28] Susan Lambert: Yeah, I, I actually think that it is. And you know, not to go all meta here, but like, this makes me when we, you know, take this all the way back to the start of our conversation, which is all about comprehension.

And we have covered sort of this, I, I'm going to call it this, this triangle of information. We've talked about comprehension, how it's related to prior knowledge and knowledge building. Right? So we've, we've sort of covered that, but also we've covered, like, how this relates to how we actually, like this idea of learning science, like how our, our brain actually works.

And so, you know, just sort of to put a pin in it for our listeners, comprehension is a fairly complex and important process when we think about what it means for learning and lifelong learning and, and the way sort of our mind works. Is that a crazy statement?

[00:33:21] David Rapp: No, I, I think it's a, I think it's a very important statement for people to understand that it feels easy for us to comprehend texts if we're well practiced at. It feels easy, but it's actually a lot of cognitive operations going on behind the scenes and a lot of years of practice of you as a comprehender, of figuring out what things mean and how they go together and figuring out, when do I consult different sources? When do I decide something's true? And if I think something's true or not, what do I do with that information? And the more that you engage in that space and think about, "Wow, there's lots of different contributors to my understanding the world, there's my ability to read, my ability to reason my attending different things."

I think that appreciation also can encourage people to really, you know, work harder as they're contemplating and thinking about the world. And that's useful. So in K-8 grades, you know, K-12, from birth and beyond, you know, to senior citizen thinking about, you know, the skills and practices you have and how they help you understand the world and when you call into question things. Those are really important skills that we want to encourage others to use. And really encourage ourselves to think deeply about so we can comprehend the world.

[00:34:30] Susan Lambert: Yeah, and that's a great reminder when we talk about, you know, from birth all the way through, is that, um, the great thing about the process of comprehension is that it helps us be lifelong learners, right?

It's all about the, well, and I guess we comprehend for entertainment too, but all about the process of, of learning and growing. Um. I'm going to talk a little bit about how my thinking of comprehension has changed, and I'd really love to hear about ...

[00:34:58] David Rapp: Yeah.

[00:34:58] Susan Lambert: ...how your thinking and research has changed. But, you know, it used to be, and this is a very simplistic thing, I'm not in comprehension research, so hang with me a little bit.

[00:35:07] David Rapp: Sure.

[00:35:07] Susan Lambert: But I, I used to think, uh, as comprehension as just a very small thing that when a reader was reading a text, they either understood that text or they didn't understand that text. I never understood comprehension to be a process by which we employ to understand connections within the text, and that you can come out at the end of reading a text, short or long, and have different levels of comprehension based on either your understanding of the text, your ability to make coherent connections, or the purpose you're reading the text. I might be skimming this text just for one thing. So comprehension is a really big, I used to call it a continuum, and now I think that there, there has to be like, I think that's more like, I don't know what the word...

[00:35:56] David Rapp: Multidimensional or something.

[00:35:57] Susan Lambert: Multidimensional. That's better. Yeah.

[00:35:59] David Rapp: Yeah.

[00:36:00] Susan Lambert: I wonder about how you being deep inside this comprehension research, how has your thinking about it changed over the course of the years? Twenty years you've been doing this or something?

[00:36:12] David Rapp: Yeah, longer than that. Um. Yeah, that's a great question and it makes me have to reflect on it.

I think I was probably in the same space as you, right? That I thought comprehension meant people either understood it or not, and that meant a variety of possible things that maybe people had a handle on. But I think over time I've thought a lot about like, are there processes that are going on along the way that support or create problems for comprehension?

Sometimes our most effective processes actually lead us to misunderstand. For example, if you're really good at encoding information to memory, that's great. Except if you're exposed to inaccurate ideas, that's a problem.

[00:36:49] Susan Lambert: Oh yeah.

[00:36:49] David Rapp: So it's a routine process, right?

[00:36:51] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:36:51] David Rapp: That, that you want to work. And if it works optimally, it means you might be misinformed.

So I've thought a lot about that. I've thought a lot about, um, especially with, with kids, with thinking about like young kids. So some of my early work with colleagues at the University of Minnesota was looking at when people have comprehension difficulty, can we discern profiles of those difficulties?

For example, could we see different kind of readers having different difficulties? And you see a lot of that in the like decoding space, but not a lot of that in like the higher order comprehension space. Um. And we found things like, there are some kids who are great inferences. So they can read a text and make inferences about what the next possible thing will be that'll happen and what the author might want to do, but the inferences they're making are wrong.

[00:37:40] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:37:40] David Rapp: Like they're making inferences that are unbounded by what the text suggest should happen. So they're having a kind of reading difficulty that we don't talk a lot about. Right? Because if we have a kid in our class who makes a lot of inferences, we're usually happy.

[00:37:53] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:37:54] David Rapp: But if they're the wrong inferences... So we get that. We get some kids who don't make a lot of inferences. When you ask them what the text's about, they're like, "The text said that this happened." Like they just tell you exactly what the description was.

[00:38:05] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:38:05] David Rapp: Which is good to remember that, but you kind of want them to push the con—so I think over time my, my notions and ideas of what comprehension can be and the ways in which it can go astray have really become more elaborated, because I've seen different cases of readers, kids and adults, having difficulties. And as I've seen the kind of research that has been able to discern good and struggling readers...

[00:38:29] Susan Lambert: mm-hmm.

[00:38:30] David Rapp: ... of lots of different kinds. And to think that it's really complicated, and it might not just be about, it could be about memory difficulties, it could be about attentional difficulties, it could be about prior knowledge difficulties. And one way I think about that now is, it makes me want to serve schools in the sense that, wow, this is hard. How are teachers wrestling with this? Teachers have all kinds of knowledge and skills and expertise, and now they're being asked to diagnose and rectify and remediate all these different kinds of possibilities. So it, it leads me to want to generate projects and grants and supports to help teachers build interventions which may or may not be tractable, you know?

A lot of the things we see in the lab that work, we might not be able to scale up to a giant classroom setting. So I've thought about comprehension in terms of, how do I, how do I help this, this is kind of highfalutin, how do I make the world a better place? How do I, how do I help people become better comprehenders?

With the realization, sometimes comprehension difficulties actually are reflecting effective processing.

[00:39:33] Susan Lambert: That's so interesting. You, you talked a lot about, you know, you're thinking about misinformation, the great processes that can go wrong. Where, where has that taken you now in terms of current research?

[00:39:46] David Rapp: Sure. A lot of what we've looked at are, what are the contributors to when and why people might rely on misinformation that go beyond just the processes? So things like, how does knowledge of a source convey the misinformation matter? And as you might suspect, if you trust someone, you're more likely to rely on the information they said than if you don't trust.

[00:40:06] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:40:06] David Rapp: We have some studies, some findings that suggest if you don't know anything about the credibility of the source, you tend to rely on it, like you treat it as if it was credible, which is kind of interesting. We've got some work looking at people's confidence and how that influences their comprehension, both in terms of if they opt to do more evaluation. If you're really confident in what you know, you don't do that. You might not be as likely to critically evaluate your thinking. So what can we do to help people realize confidence might not always be correct? You might be overconfident, and if so, how do you deal with that when you're trying to learn about the world?

And again, all of this is in the context of when you're reading, right?

[00:40:44] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:40:44] David Rapp: We're really worried now in the lab about, people are reading quick blog posts on ideas that might make people feel like they're now expert on pretty complicated topics. So how do we help people understand, you know, this is just an introduction?

If you really want to understand natural selection or why the seasons change or how politics works, it's going to take a little bit more work. So before you become confident and start telling other people and espousing views about how the world works, you might want to take a step back. So, so a lot of our work is thinking about pragmatic contributors to when and why misinformation might have an effect.

And then the other space, uh, we're starting to move into and think about is the effects of artificial intelligence on comprehension experiences. So I'm not someone who designs artificial intelligence systems, but I'm very interested in what people think AI can do and whether that it will influence whether and why they might use AI to help support their comprehension.

Like there could be great cases where you actually could ask an AI to help you understand something so you can think more deeply about it. You know, a lot of what we read about AI now is, people are using AI instead of doing the work that's bad. But there are certainly cases where you might use AI as a thought partner.

[00:41:56] Susan Lambert: Mm.

[00:41:56] David Rapp: Or you know, a supportive resource to help you comprehend. So we're thinking a lot about, what are the contributors to whether and why people might use AI, and then what does that mean for ways we could design comprehension experiences that might involve AI systems?

[00:42:11] Susan Lambert: Interesting. So you've sort of been thinking about supporting strong comprehension and misinformation in both the comprehension process world and the comprehension product world and what that means for the next time you approach a text.

[00:42:24] David Rapp: Yeah, that's the hope. Can we help people as they're reading, realize what's correct or not? Can we help them after they're done reading know what they should use to make decisions and inform their behaviors, health behaviors, wellbeing behaviors, behaviors when they interact with others? So yeah, process and product is really critically important for thinking about that stuff.

[00:42:43] Susan Lambert: Very cool. Very cool. Well, and maybe we should just do a shout out that if this is intriguing any educators out there and they want to go back and do some more extended work in reading comprehension, like get to Northwestern and talk to Dr. David Rapp!

He's got a great lab, which by the way, I just discovered your lab, the website, and we'll link our listeners in the show notes to that.

[00:43:04] David Rapp: Yeah, please.

[00:43:05] Susan Lambert: That's fairly new.

[00:43:06] David Rapp: Yeah. Yeah. We've been, we revamp it every, every couple years I have a new graduate student who says, "You know, your website looks out of date. You need to revamp it." So then we, we decide to fix it up. You know, we put a lot of the articles we have in there and we have some articles that are written for different audiences. So we have some pieces that are written really for general introductions that people might take a look at to understand some of our findings and how we contextualize it with respect to like applications that might be useful for teachers.

And then we have some more, you know, scientifically motivated articles that are going to have t-tests and statistics that people might not want to read. Um. But we try to keep it all there. And who knows, if people listen to this and then look three years from now, we might have a different website.

[00:43:44] Susan Lambert: Well, but, but for sure I was going to, um, mention the fact that there are many, many articles linked there, which is, um, such a great resource because nowadays, you know that teachers and educators don't often have access to articles like that.

So listeners, if you're interested in that, hit the show notes for that link. So, you know, before we, I was going to say before we wrap up with Dr. Rapp! Come on now! But!

[00:44:09] David Rapp: I like puns, so I don't mind.

[00:44:11] Susan Lambert: There you go. Any closing thoughts or advice you have for our listeners?

[00:44:15] David Rapp: I think I would just recommend to folks that, you know, there's lots of people doing lots of amazing research, really relevant, useful research on reading, reading comprehension. Both on the lower order, which again, is not meant in any derogatory way, it's just trying to distinguish between word letter recognition versus thematic inferencing kinds of processes. There's lots of people doing research on those, in those spaces, and if you reach out to them and ask, you know, for their articles, if you ask them if they have any, you know, more scientific or more layperson kinds of articles, they'll be happy to share.

You know, I'm often excited when people reach out to me and say, "Hey, you know, I wanted to know more about reading. Do you have any recommendations for things I might take a look at that I could apply in my classroom?" It might take me a little while to respond, but I always love that because I really, you know, the goal is for me, and I think for many people, for the research to get put into practice.

[00:45:03] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:45:03] David Rapp: It's one thing for me, able to talk to colleagues at a conference about some account I have about how memory works, but it's quite another thing to be able to interact with teachers and parents and caregivers and say, "Hey, let's think about how we can help comprehension, you know, become more effective." Especially in the contemporary world where people are so worried about information.

[00:45:21] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:45:21] David Rapp: And whether it's correct or not. So yeah, happy to talk with folks and I encourage people to reach out to researchers and touch base with them. I bet they're going to be happy to respond. Now that I said that, please don't write me if you get someone who didn't respond and they're upset because there's always going to be a case like that. But the, the folks I know are happy to talk.

[00:45:37] Susan Lambert: Oh, agree. Agree. I think, I think people that are doing hard work of research really do want their ideas and their thoughts out to make a difference in the world. So thank you again for joining us, David. It was such a pleasure, and like I said, we'll link our listeners in the show notes to all the work that you're doing. But thank you for sharing your expertise. We appreciate it.

[00:45:55] David Rapp: Yeah, thanks so much. This was really fun, and I love to talk to other folks who love libraries.

[00:45:59] Susan Lambert: Yay!

That was Dr. David N. Rapp, Walter Dill Scott Professor of Education, social policy and psychology at Northwestern University.

Please remember to submit your own questions about comprehension at amplify.com/SORmailbag. We'd love to address them in an upcoming episode. Also, you can now access a new collection of free comprehension resources, including e-books and on-demand professional learning, by visiting at.amplify.com/comprehension101.

Next up in our Season 10 deep dive into comprehension, we're putting the spotlight on comprehension assessment. I'll be joined by Dr. Gina Biancarosa.

[00:46:48] Gina Biancarosa: Historically, you know, for over a hundred years, the way that we've assessed reading comprehension is by asking questions after someone's done reading. The problem with that, it's twofold.

One, you're not getting at that process. You're only kind of getting at the end state. But even more importantly, once you ask a question, you can change what it is that someone has understood from what they read.

[00:47:13] Susan Lambert: Also, the most recent episode of the Beyond My Years podcast features Dr. Angela Duckworth, author of the bestseller, Grit.

Listen in as Ana Torres interviews Dr. Duckworth about her new landmark research on school phone policies and the science of self-control.

[00:47:33] Angela Duckworth: One of the reasons I'm studying phones in schools is that, it is not just trying hard that makes you successful. You need to be set up in a situation that helps you like an ally as opposed to fighting you like an enemy.

And when we talk about schools today, there is an enemy, I think, that I didn't have to contend with when I was a teacher.

[00:47:59] Susan Lambert: That's available now in the Beyond My Years feed. There's a link in the show notes. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.