introduction to literacy processes - guilford

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Introduction to Literacy ProcessesCognitive Flexibility in Learning and Teaching

KELLY B. CARTWRIGHT

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold twoopposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain theability to function.

—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (1964, p. 69)

This book is about flexibility in literacy processes and instruction.The ideas presented here rest on the assumption that reading, writing, andliteracy instruction are all complex activities that require individuals tocoordinate information from many sources. Each of these activities canbe characterized as a complex cognitive juggling act. Although these ac-tivities may involve different goals and potentially different underlyingprocesses, reading, writing, and literacy instruction each require individ-uals to flexibly manage multiple features of stimuli or multiple aspects ofsituations at any given time. The many and varied elements of literacytasks must each be processed (or represented) mentally, whether aboveor below conscious awareness. Contemporary work in cognitive devel-opment indicates that the ability to manage multiple mental representa-tions, and to do this flexibly, develops across the lifespan and varieswithin and across individuals. This kind of cognitive flexibility bridgesthe areas of reading, writing, and literacy instruction and may serve to

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This is a chapter excerpt from Guilford Publications.Literary Processes: Cognitive Flexibility in Learning and Teachingby Kelly B. Cartwright. Copyright © 2008

inform understanding of these literacy processes. The motivation for thisvolume is to demonstrate applications of contemporary perspectives incognitive development, especially with respect to representational devel-opment and flexibility, to research in literacy processes and instruction.

The act of reading, for example, involves many levels of mental rep-resentation such as the phonological, orthographic, morphological, lexi-cal, and semantic levels (Adams, 1990; Beck & Carpenter, 1986; Ehri,1992; Just & Carpenter, 1980; Nagy, Berninger, Abbott, Vaughan, &Vermeulen, 2003; Perfetti, 1985). Individuals who can flexibly managethese kinds of information read skillfully, while unskilled readers aretypically inflexible, focusing, for example, on word-level phonologicalinformation to the exclusion of meaning (Cartwright, 2002, 2006;Gaskins & Gaskins, 1997; Oakhill & Yuill, 1996; Pressley, 2006). Simi-larly, literacy instruction requires the representation of information frommultiple sources, as reading teachers must coordinate information re-garding their own goals and plans for instruction while simultaneouslyattending to students’ responses, the effectiveness of ongoing instruc-tional activities, and students’ apparent understanding (or lack of under-standing) of the lesson in progress. The best literacy teachers do thisquite well, flexibly adapting their lessons-in-progress according to stu-dent responses, incorporating their prior knowledge of skilled readinginstruction, and accessing and explaining their own cognitive processesas skilled readers (Block & Israel, 2004; Duffy, 2003; Pressley, 2006;Pressley, Allington, Wharton-McDonald, Block, & Morrow, 2001; Sha-velson, 1983; Stern & Shavelson, 1983). Less effective literacy teachers,however, seem quite inflexible and often stick with an instructional plan(one representation of the way a lesson should occur) even when avail-able evidence would suggest that adaptation would produce more opti-mal instructional outcomes (Agee, 2000; Pressley, 2006; Pressley et al.,2001; Shavelson, 1983; Stern & Shavelson, 1983).

Literacy learners and literacy teachers have something in common.To read, write, or teach well, they must be able to handle informationfrom a variety of sources, and they must do this mentally. That is, theymust flexibly coordinate multiple mental representations in order to readand write skillfully or to teach literacy effectively. It is important to notethat individuals may not always have conscious metacognitive access totheir mental representations, whether they are literacy students or liter-acy teachers (Karmiloff-Smith, 1991; Masson, 1987). In fact, in theirdiscussion of the nature of representational development, Forguson andGopnik (1988) asserted that “we typically do not allege that those towhom we ascribe mental representations consciously experience the rep-

4 THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS

resentations we attribute to them. Indeed, even we language-using adultstypically do not experience our own mental representations as such; theyare psychologically transparent, not noticed (or perhaps better, beneathnotice)” (p. 229).

Because reading, writing, and literacy instruction require individu-als to process many kinds of information in tandem, recent advances inthe field of cognitive development, especially with respect to individuals’representational skills, may serve to inform research on literacy pro-cesses and instructional practices. Little work, however, has focused onapplications of contemporary cognitive–developmental theory to literacyprocesses, and even less work has investigated reading-specific applica-tions of representational development and flexibility. This is not surpris-ing, as the fields of educational and developmental psychology have his-torically operated independently, and the insular nature of these fieldshas often prevented the kinds of cross-fertilization that might advancescientific understanding of developmental and educational processes(Sternberg, 2000; Sternberg & Lyon, 2002). In the millennium issue ofthe journal Child Development (the flagship journal of the Society forResearch in Child Development) Horowitz (2000) argued that completeconceptualizations of human development must forge connections be-tween multiple bodies of literature and account for multiple types ofdata. This volume offers such connections by highlighting the intersec-tion between the fields of cognitive development and literacy learningand instruction.

SPECIFIC PURPOSES FOR THIS BOOK

This volume is intended to accomplish three purposes. The first purpose is topresent background information on contemporary cognitive–developmentaltheory and the nature and development of representational abilitiesacross the lifespan in order to provide a conceptual foundation for un-derstanding the potential applications of representational skill and theflexibility with which individuals can process multiple cognitive repre-sentations to literacy processes and practice. This is accomplished in thefirst part of the book, which includes chapters that provide a rationalefor examining literacy processes through the lens of flexibility as well asbackground information on cognitive–developmental theory and repre-sentational development in children and adults.

The second purpose of the volume is to present research on variousaspects of literacy processes and instruction to which information on

Introduction 5

representational development and flexibility may be readily applied.Chapters in the second, third, and fourth parts of the book addressword-level processes, comprehension processes, and instructional prac-tices, respectively. Chapters in these parts have been contributed by liter-acy researchers who believe that work in their respective research areascan be informed by contemporary cognitive–developmental perspectiveson cognitive flexibility as well as by researchers in cognitive develop-ment whose work is relevant to the focus of the volume. Each chaptercontributor was asked to present data or to review work in her or hisown research area and to discuss the implications of representationalflexibility for work in that area. Thus the second purpose of the volumeis integrative in the sense that it will provide a conceptual connection,namely, representational development and flexibility, between the do-mains of cognitive development and literacy as well as between seem-ingly disparate areas of the literacy research literature.

Finally, the third purpose of the volume is a logical outcome of thesecond. This volume is intended to provide a starting point for conversa-tions about flexibility in literacy processes and instructional practices.Additionally, this book will provide directions for future research inreading, writing, and literacy instruction that is informed by recent workin cognitive development, specifically with respect to representationaldevelopment and flexibility.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Early Notions of Flexibility in Reading

As one reviewer of an earlier version of this chapter suggested, flexibilityin reading is not a new concept. Many theories of reading support thenotion that readers must process many kinds of information simulta-neously, and flexibly, in order to read well (see, e.g., Adams, 1990; Clay,2001; Ehri, 1992; Just & Carpenter, 1980; Perfetti, 1985; Seidenberg,1992). Additionally, from the 1940s to the 1960s (and even into the1980s) much work focused on reading flexibility, commonly defined as areader’s ability to vary his or her reading rate as a function of type ofreading task and reading purpose (Berger, 1967; Blommers & Lindquist,1944; Braam, 1963; Carillo & Sheldon, 1952; DiStefano, Noe, & Valen-cia, 1981; Dowdy, Crump, & Welch, 1982; McDonald, 1965; Ramsel &Grabe, 1983; Wagner & Sternberg, 1987). According to Fry (1978,p. 11), “One sign of a good reader is flexibility. Good readers are able to


adapt their reading skills to meet the demands of the material they wishto cover.” Wagner and Sternberg (1987) tied this definition of flexibilityto executive control processes, the cognitive mechanisms by which indi-viduals consciously monitor their own reading processes.

In recent decades Spiro and colleagues emphasized the importanceof flexibility in knowledge representation and acquisition. According totheir cognitive flexibility theory, expertise in complex, ill-structuredknowledge domains, such as literacy, can only be developed whenknowledge is flexibly structured and accessed (Spiro, Vispoel, Schmitz,Samarapungavan, & Boerger, 1987; Spiro, Feltovich, Jacobson, &Coulson, 1992). Although the primary emphasis of their theory was onflexibility in knowledge structures, they also emphasized developing“habits of mind suited to dealing with complexity” (Spiro, 2004, p. 657)so that individuals can “apply knowledge . . . with adaptive flexibility”(p. 658), and they emphasized the importance of developing instruc-tional techniques that foster this kind of flexible thinking. Spiro and col-leagues clearly articulated the importance of flexibility for literacy pro-cesses and instruction; their work was less clear, however, about thecognitive–developmental mechanisms that foster such adaptive flexibly.

Each of these previous conceptions of flexibility in reading, whetherfocused on cognitive monitoring or on knowledge acquisition, is cer-tainly compatible with the ideas presented in this book. However, theseconceptions of reading flexibility paint an incomplete picture of the literacy-related skills and abilities that may be supported by development in rep-resentational flexibility. Contemporary cognitive–developmental researchhas much to offer in further informing our understanding of literacyprocesses and instruction. Certainly, to be able to process the meaning ofa text, monitor one’s own comprehension, adjust one’s level of attentionto match the level of difficulty of a text, flexibly access and apply knowl-edge, and maintain awareness of one’s purpose for reading, one musthandle multiple sources of information or processes simultaneously. Theability to monitor one’s own comprehension processes, or metacogni-tion, plays an important role in skilled reading (Block & Pressley, 2002;Israel, Block, Bauserman, & Kinnucan-Welsch, 2005; Pressley & Affler-bach, 1995). As described above, however, readers also process informa-tion, or representations, of which they are not metacognitively aware(e.g., phonological information is often processed below the level of con-scious awareness). Additionally, the ability to flexibly manage multipletypes of information contributes to literacy processes other than compre-hension, such as word-level processes (Brown & Deavers, 1999; Gos-

Introduction 7

wami, Ziegler, Dalton, & Schneider, 2001, 2003; Nagy et al., 2003;Simpson & Kang, 1994; Wimmer & Goswami, 1994) and effective liter-acy instructional practices (Pressley, 2006; Pressley et al., 2001; Shavel-son, 1983; Stern & Shavelson, 1983). Thus, this volume is intended togo beyond prior conceptions of flexibility by demonstrating how repre-sentational flexibility may contribute to literacy processes at multiplelevels and in multiple contexts.

Historical and Contemporary Perspectiveson Cognitive Development

Historically, Piaget’s theory of cognitive development provided some ofthe foundational ideas for understanding how the capacity for handlingcomplex tasks develops. Piaget demonstrated that across childhood indi-viduals develop the ability to consider multiple mental representationsand use them concurrently and flexibly when engaging in a task. Thisshift in mental abilities allows individuals to consider multiple stimuli,ideas, or representations (or multiple aspects of a single stimulus) simul-taneously and accounts for increased flexibility in thinking with age(Inhelder & Piaget, 1964; Piaget & Inhelder, 1969). Piaget assumed,however, that these representational changes were domain-general, thatis, these changes generally affected all types of thinking in the same wayand at the same points in development. Researchers investigating the re-lation of these changes to reading skill (in the decades following the in-troduction of Piaget’s ideas in the United States) also made this assump-tion. Several studies showed that children’s representational changes(measured with general Piagetian tasks) were related to their readingskill (Arlin, 1981; Briggs & Elkind, 1973; Canter, 1975; Cohen, Hyman,& Battistini, 1983; Elkind, Larson, & Van Doornick, 1965), but the spe-cific nature of this relation was not identified in these studies. Piaget’sideas also provided a theoretical foundation for neo-Piagetians andother cognitive–developmental theorists to investigate how individualscome to be able to handle increasingly complex multifaceted tasks.

Since that time, many advances have been made in terms of the na-ture and course of cognitive development. First, the development of cog-nitive processes, including improvements in representational flexibility,appears to be more gradual (rather than stage-like) than Piaget originallyproposed (see Sternberg & Berg, 1992; Sinnott, 1998). Second, othershave demonstrated that cognitive development continues into adulthood(Andrews & Halford, 2002; Kuhn & Pease, 2006; Labouvie-Vief, 1990,


1992; Luna, Garver, Urban, Lazar, & Sweeney, 2004; Sinnott, 1998; seealso Sinnott, Chapter 3, this volume) and the flexibility with which indi-viduals can consider multiple perspectives varies, even in adults (Kuhn& Pease, 2006; Labouvie-Vief, 1990, 1992; Sinnott, 1998). Third, re-cent research and theory in cognitive development has shown that think-ing often develops within particular domains of knowledge, based on ex-perience within those domains, and that cognitive advances in one areado not ensure cognitive advances in another (e.g., see Alexander, 1998;Alexander, Jetton, & Kulikowich, 1995; Alexander, Sperl, Buehl, Fives,& Chiu, 2004; Case, 1992; Case & Okamoto, 1996; Karmiloff-Smith,1991; Piaget, 1972; Sinnott, 1998). For example, over the past severaldecades research in cognitive development has examined the effects ofchildren’s changing representational abilities in a variety of domains,such as children’s understanding of pictures and models as representa-tions of the real world (DeLoache, 1991), children’s understanding ofothers’ thought processes (i.e., theory of mind; Astington, Harris, &Olson, 1988; Perner, Leekham, & Wimmer, 1987), children’s under-standing of the sometimes ambiguous distinction between appearanceand reality (Flavell, Green, & Flavell, 1986), and children’s language(see Deák, 2003, for a review) and metacognitive abilities (see Flavell,1988, for a review). Each of these tasks, like literacy tasks, requires thatchildren (and adults) flexibly consider more than one representation at atime (n.b., contemporary cognitive–developmental work has shown thatworking memory demands do not account for these differences; seeDeak, 2003, for a review). However, little research has focused on thedomain of reading and specific ways that individuals’ developing repre-sentational abilities, especially flexibility in handling multiple mentalrepresentations, may affect literacy processes.

Finally, some cognitive–developmental theorists have recently begunto focus on explanations for cognitive improvements that center on no-tions of cognitive complexity, or the number of relations or representa-tions that must be processed when engaging in a particular task. Zelazoand colleagues, for example, have proposed that cognitive complexityand executive control underlie cognitive changes in childhood (Frye,Zelazo, & Burack, 1998; Frye, Zelazo, & Palfai, 1995; Jacques &Zelazo, 2001; Zelazo & Frye, 1998; also see Perner & Lang, 1999).These researchers distinguish between “cold” tasks (purely cognitivetasks) and “hot” tasks (social or affective tasks), and argue that successon both of these kinds of tasks may reflect the same underlying ability tomentally represent multiple elements (Jacques & Zelazo, 2005; Zelazo

Introduction 9

& Müller, 2002; Zelazo, Müller, Frye, & Marcovitch, 2003). Further,Kloo and Perner (2003, 2005) have noted that children may have partic-ular difficulty learning “to think about one object in different ways”(2005, p. 53)—a skill that is required for successful reading, as childrenmust learn to think about print in many different ways. Finally, Zelazoet al. (2003) also suggested that even though adults may be “capable” ofhandling these kinds of complex tasks, they do not always do so. In sup-port of this notion, Andrews and Halford (2002) demonstrated that cog-nitive complexity, and the ability to handle multiple elements simulta-neously, underlies cognitive changes from childhood and into adulthood.Further, Diamond and Kirkham (2005) showed that adults demon-strated difficulty thinking about stimuli in multiple ways, similar to thedifficulties observed in children (also see Kirkham, Cruess, & Diamond,2003, for a discussion of adults’ difficulty in considering multiple con-flicting representations of stimuli).

GUIDING ASSUMPTIONS FOR THE BOOK

The primary assumption guiding the work in this book is that literacyprocesses are complex activities. Recent trends in U.S. literacy educationrequiring mandated, and often scripted, curricula foster oversimplifiedviews of literacy processes and instruction that may not lead to the besteducational outcomes for all children (Allington, 2002; Pressley, Duke,& Boling, 2004). In order to provide optimal instruction for optimal ed-ucational outcomes, we cannot lose sight of the complexities involved inliteracy processing and the ways that individual literacy learners andteachers handle those complexities (see Pressley et al., in press, for a dis-cussion of the necessity for a “less simple” view of reading).

Given the recent advances in cognitive–developmental theory andresearch, this volume is based on the following additional assumptions.First, literacy processes, whether cold or hot, are complex and requireindividuals to process multiple features or representations. Second, cog-nitive development generally, and the flexibility with which individualscan handle multiple representations in particular, gradually improvesacross childhood and into adulthood. Furthermore, these changes in rep-resentational skill are characterized by individual variation, regardless ofage. This suggests that children at a particular age or grade level willvary in their ability to flexibly handle the many representations involvedin literacy tasks, and even adult literacy teachers will show individualvariation in the flexibility with which they can handle the multiple kinds


of information necessary for effective reading, writing, or literacy in-struction. In addition, because task-specific (or domain-specific) experi-ence is important for cognitive development to occur, reading-specificexperience should be related to reading-specific flexibility (data from ourlab support this notion; see Cartwright, 2007; Cartwright, Dandy, Isaac,& Marshall, 2004), and literacy teachers may be able to provide experi-ences for students that will foster the flexibility necessary for literacysuccess. Fisher and Hiebert (1990) have shown that different kinds of in-structional practices foster more (or less) complex thinking in students,but additional work is needed to determine which instructional practicesfoster the kinds of cognitive flexibility needed for literacy success.

Finally, as described by Forguson and Gopnik (1988; also seeKarmiloff-Smith, 1991; Masson, 1987), the information to be repre-sented in literacy learning or teaching may or may not be consciouslyaccessible to individuals engaged in these tasks. For example, skilledreaders, both children and adults, may consciously attend to semanticaspects of a text and demonstrate relatively automatic phonological pro-cessing of text (Crain-Thoreson, 1996; Luo, Johnson, & Gallo, 1998;McCutcheon & Crain-Thoreson, 1994; McCutchen, Dibble, & Blount,1994; Van Orden, 1987). This example draws on cold, or purely cogni-tive, sources of information to be represented by readers (i.e., phonologi-cal and semantic aspects of text). However, representational skill alsounderlies the ability to coordinate everyday representations that onemust handle in social situations. For example, work in children’s theoryof mind shows that children often have difficulty considering their ownrepresentation of a situation and another person’s different belief aboutthe same situation (i.e., two different mental representations; see Asting-ton et al., 1988; Perner et al., 1987; also see Wellman, Cross, & Watson,2001, for a review and meta-analysis). This scenario is analogous to theliteracy teacher’s experience in the course of a reading lesson. To engagestudents effectively, a teacher must represent multiple perspectives. Theteacher must consider her or his own plans and goals for a reading les-son, anticipate students’ responses to that lesson, and also infer students’levels of understanding of the lesson. Literacy teachers who can coordi-nate these perspectives can adjust their instructional plans accordingly,leading to better instructional outcomes. Teachers who are less able tocoordinate these perspectives (or who are unaware of students’ perspec-tives) while engaged in teaching a reading lesson are more likely tocontinue inflexibly with their planned lessons, leading to less optimallearning outcomes for students (Pressley, 2006; Pressley et al., 2001;Shavelson, 1983; Stern & Shavelson, 1983).

Introduction 11

SUMMARY

In summary, this edited volume is based on recent advances in the fieldof cognitive development that focus on the flexibility with which indi-viduals are able to handle cognitively complex tasks across the lifespan.Although the concept of “flexibility in reading” is not novel, this volumeis intended to go beyond prior conceptions of reading flexibility by dem-onstrating how representational development and flexibility may con-tribute to all kinds of literacy processes, word-level processes, compre-hension processes, and literacy instruction, at multiple levels and inmultiple contexts. Thus this book provides something new to the fieldby applying recent theoretical advances in cognitive development to thedomain of literacy, creating a bridge between two fields that typicallyoperate independently (Sternberg, 2000; Sternberg & Lyon, 2002). It ismy hope that this volume will provide a starting point for conversationsand hypotheses about flexibility that will enhance understanding of thecomplexities involved in literacy learning and instruction, leading tobetter instructional practices for teachers and better educational out-comes for children.

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