Flower Haas Close Reading of Reader-Response

Their claim is this article ends up being that student readers need to use rhetorical skills, or in more literary terms, make allusions between texts while also paraphrasing.  It is often to the crux of many students especially in the high school and community college level that they often repeat or regurgitate information.  It's kind of degradation to the max as Bakhtin might smirkingly say.  And I knew from the very beginning what she was talking about for these students often come asking for help on a 3-5 page essay.  When I tell them what an analysis is or how to go about it, I often find that they had no clue what analysis was in the first place.  I think the expectations of Flower-Haas is a bit over-reaching trying to compare graduate students to freshman college students.  Even the "above-average" student usually doesn't come close to the graduate student.  Of course, the text that they choose is something that hardly any of them know (3 of the experienced readers are engineers), which was from a psychology textbook.  I think even still it's a bit unfair due to age difference and the knowledge shared.  What would be interesting would be to get an average senior writer in the major vs. an experience reader in the engineering field.  One who knew the allusions, one who didn't and how THAT compared.
The gap between them also resulted in pretty lop-sided statistics.  Of course, what the test shows is that freshman comp. students are unable to (and she suggests that cognitively they are not ready enough) rhetorical practices like grad students.  If they did, Flower and Haas imagine that students would be far more able in a class to benefit from reading texts.
All of the students seemed able to produce the main content of the essay, but the implied meanings resonate far more so with grad students.  This is indeed, at least to me, not surprising especially if these students have taken a class on criticism or if they've experienced the horrors of the GRE.  Grad students are pushed much harder to identify knowledge and put things together than Freshman students are and I think that's just enough.  For how can you make a Freshman comp. class understand the emotions of an event if they are completely ignorant of it?
Although the results show what could possibly benefit students, I think the disparity between the level of expectation and the knowledge of students is an important factor to consider.  I can at least agree with Flower and Haas that reading should be taught more than just looking for content information.  It should teach students that we should use the information to provide evidence for how we feel on a topic rather than just blurting out things at random as we too often do.