No correlation between inferencing causal relations and text comprehension?

In this study, the causal network model of Trabasso and Van den Broek was used to create short narrative texts and to analyse inferencing processes induced from verbal protocols collected during reading and thinking aloud tasks. Inferential skills were taught of inferencing by offering 10- and 11-year-old students a training programme in which both local and global coherence were topics of explanation and practice. The programme enhanced inferential skills but did not increase performance on a Dutch standardised text comprehension test. It was argued that the test format (answering multiple choice questions about an available text) may have been responsible for this lack of transfer. Therefore, a second experiment was conducted in which correlations between performance on reading and thinking aloud tests and comprehension tests were analysed with both different texts and identical texts. Again, no correlations showed up between reading and thinking aloud performance and comprehension scores on the closed comprehension test with the text at hand. Several tentative explanations were offered. The reading and thinking aloud test may have drawn substantially on verbal fluency. Apart from that, the testing format of the text comprehension test was seriously questioned.