By age 3, children are able to follow a character’s movement in a story from the character’s perspective. 

Narrative Processing (age 3)

Starting at ages 4 and 5, children are able to follow a character’s basic thoughts and feelings in a story including the valence of the character’s feelings. This helps children with understanding what a character wants to do. 

Narrative Processing (ages 4 to 5)

By age 7, children follow a character’s goals and misunderstandings. This is a more complex continuation of understanding a character’s thoughts since it requires following other character’s thoughts and how they interact with one another. 

Narrative Processing (ages 7)

Each theory of mind stage and narrative processing stage line up together and are about similar concepts. However, this doesn’t mean there is a causal relationship between the two. It’s also not clear if ToM stages happens before or after the narrative processing stages.

Theory of Mind and Narrative Processing 

The way children understand a story they are listening to or reading. Narrative processing develops throughout childhood depending on how a child can follow a character in a story.

Stanford University

Gaining understanding of a written text by coming to a conclusion of its meaning. Comprehension occurs based off of the reader's prior knowledge of language and ability to make inferences.

Reading Comprehension

Dore, Rebecca & Amendum, Steve & Golinkoff, Roberta & Hirsh-Pasek, Kathy. (2018). Theory of Mind: a Hidden Factor in Reading Comprehension?. Educational Psychology Review. 30. 10.1007/s10648-018-9443-9. 

Theory of Mind: a Hidden Factor in Reading Comprehension?

Narrative Processing

- Assessing and measuring reading comprehension

Learning Analytics of Academic Performance

Moderate-emerging and high-chronic victims of peer victimization have lower reading scores at the start of school, but this goes away by 12th grade. Reading performance is not as affected by peer victimization as math performance is.

Peer Victimization and Reading Performance

Factors Affecting Reading Comprehension

Reading Comprehension in Experiment Design

- SAT
- ACT
- GRE
- LSAT
- MCAT
- GMAT
- TOEFL

Reading Comprehension in Standardized Tests

- Reading comprehension is very much related to cognitive psychology 
- Reading is a complex human behavior that requires higher cognitive demands 
- Reading comprehension is important for basic skills such as completing tax forms, reading menus, scholastic achievement, and more. 


Reading Comprehension + Cognitive Psychology

- Text Chunking
- Text Line Length
- Line-length variability

Text Format Factors Related to Reading Comprehension

- Question Answering Test: Students answer a worksheet of questions about a reading passage
- Recall Measures: Students retell the contents of a passage in their own words
- Oral Passage Reading Test: Students are timed while reading out loud; examiners score them
- Cloze Technique: Student writes or says missing words that have been deleted from a passage

Reading Comprehension Measures

Application questions, as contrasted to questions that repeated examples or questions on names of significant people, yield the greatest general facilitative effect on learning by prompting the student to inspect and comprehend thetext more thoroughly. 

Learn Before

Related

Learn After