Can automated questioning help children's reading comprehension?

We present an automated method to ask children questions during assisted reading, and experimentally evaluate its effects on their comprehension. In 2002, after a randomly inserted generic multiple-choice What/Where/When question, children were likelier to correctly answer an automatically generated comprehension question on a later sentence. The positive effects of such questions vanished during the second half of the study in 2003. We hypothesize why.