Conference Program

Awareness and engagement in reading comprehension are among the most important competencies that schools are expected to cultivate in order to support students’ educational success and their democratic access to culture. The PRIN project “Promoting Text Comprehension as a Tool to Make Learning and Thinking Visible” pursued this goal by implementing, in fourth‑grade primary classrooms, instructional protocols designed to foster readers’ engagement in the comprehension of twelve narrative texts. The present study is situated within this broader research framework and aims to examine how children responded to the prompts of the experimental intervention, which was grounded in the principles and materials of the “text‑centered” instructional approach (Cardarello & Lumbelli, 2019; Cardarello & Bertolini, 2020) and was implemented in two formats: paper‑based and digital.

The instructional protocol required students to work without direct adult guidance, following the prompts embedded in the materials—individually in half of the classrooms and in pairs in the remaining half. The exercises focused on the generation of inferences through challenging questions placed at key points in the text, sometimes repeated after the rereading of selected passages; on metacognitive prompts aimed at justifying one’s choices; and on the identification of the most relevant information to support the initial steps toward summarization (Lumbelli, 2009; Cardarello & Lumbelli, 2019). At the end of each session, in both the paper‑based and the digital experimental groups, feedback was co‑constructed through whole‑class discussions that brought to light the different arguments underlying the students’ responses.

More specifically, the study seeks to explore and document the possible development of awareness processes through which students can recognize their own errors. It examines whether, and for what reasons, children in eight fourth‑grade classes (two for each experimental subgroup: paper‑individual work, paper‑pairs, digital‑individual, digital‑pairs) revised their understanding of inferential passages by changing their responses after the rereading episodes explicitly prompted by the materials. This focus stems from the well‑established view that rereading and repetition of a reader’s “thinking aloud” support self‑correction (Lumbelli, 2009), and from the notion that the “error‑detection paradigm” is considered one of the most indicative comprehension‑monitoring processes reflecting a reader’s metacognitive control (Baker, 1984; Winograd & Johnston, 1982; Sylvestre, 2012).

Student responses were collected during the second and ninth sessions of the intervention, seven weeks apart. The results show that, regardless of the format (paper or digital) and the mode of work (individual or paired), children generally struggle to question or revise their initially expressed viewpoint. Overall, the study documents how students engaged with the instructional materials while reasoning autonomously through the experimental protocol and highlights implications for teachers and for future instructional interventions, both in paper‑based and digital reading contexts.