Abstract

ZARATE PEREZ, Adolfo  and  RUBENS LOPEZ PARI, Carlos. Difficulties Generating Causal Inferences when Reading Narrative Texts in 4^th Grade Primary School Students. Folios [online]. 2021, n.54, pp.31-50.  Epub Jan 10, 2022. ISSN 0123-4870.  https://doi.org/10.17227/folios.54-11587.

This research article explores the difficulties that fourth grade students face when generating causal inferences in the reading of narrative texts, which were part of the standardized evaluations applied by the Ministry of Education of Peru (ECE 2016, ECE 2018 and EM 2019). The analysis is carried out on the basis of the hit rate and the difficulty of the item, processing this information under the Rasch probability model. The corpus of the present study is made up of 12 multiple-choice items (48 answers: 36 distractors y 12 right answers) that evaluated the ability to infer causal relationships in reading narrative texts. According to the success rate of the selected items, students show problems in discriminating causal information in the text, especially when there is competing information, affectingthe overall understanding of the text. Furthermore, when students cannot find X (the cause of the focal proposition) they choose to search for a nearby textual clue (causal element) or a very noticeable clue in the text, and when this does not happen, they activate their prior knowledge. When this activation is inappropriate, it interferes with the generation of inferences because this activation moves it away from the text.

Keywords : causal inference; narrative texts; comprehension difficulties; cognitive processes.

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