In reading textually constrained period poetry, experts' organized domain knowledge (schemata) is the major factor differentiating them from novices, enabling allusion, contextualization and anticipation.¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · qualitative r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 1998 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Experts rapidly alluded to other literary works, categorized both poems by genre and period, and explicitly anticipated content, while novices lacked the relevant schemata and mostly failed to grasp the extended metaphor. → Peskin 1998

Evidence¶

Peskin 1998¶

Peskin, J. (1998). Constructing meaning when reading poetry: An expert-novice study. Cognition and Instruction, 16(3), 235-263. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532690xci1603_1

q2 · i? · qualitative · r2

Think-aloud expert-novice comparison (eight experts, eight novices) reading two period poems; protocol analysis coded for organized knowledge. The Results state that "the experts had a rich deposit of schemata" enabling allusion, contextualization and anticipation, while not one novice categorized the metaphysical poem.

"the experts had a rich deposit of schemata which enabled them fairly early to allude to other literary texts, to place the poem in a general context or category constrained by certain expectations pertinent to the genre of poem, and then to anticipate the content."

Discussion¶

Learner Variables¶

• Prior Knowledge — predictor: learners who differ on it differ in outcomes

Related Claims¶

• Experts employed productive interpretive strategies in making poems coherent — using structure, binary oppositions, wordplay, rhythm and rhyme as cues, and scanning to contextualize — which novices used minimally. — related
• Novices who have had poetry instruction have internalized Culler's general conventions for poetry as discourse: significance, thematic unity, and metaphorical coherence. — related
• Experts expressed greater appreciation of the poems and their specific images, while novices very frequently expressed interpretive frustration and dissatisfaction. — related
• Experts have reduced access to memory traces of their own cognitive processes due to automatization, and large domain knowledge can disadvantage performance on certain tasks — related
• Experts predict classroom phenomena and student errors far more than novices, who rarely anticipate misalgorithms — related
• Experts spent much longer on each poem and produced longer protocols than novices, because for experts finding a meaningful pattern was only the starting point for higher-level analysis. — related
• Attending to a poem's title as a structural cue was evident in novice but not expert protocols, and the title jolted a novice into revising a misinterpretation. — related
• When experts cannot make clear sense of a passage, they shift from constructing what the poem says to how the poet is saying it, treating obscurity as deliberate. — related