In eight Title I classrooms 32 first grade students were observed as they completed reading and writing assignments without continuous teacher supervision. Observations focused on the students' immediate responses, such as attention, performance on the assignment, and reported understanding of the task. Two working hypotheses are presented about the nature of the students' cognitive processing while doing these unsupervised assignments. (1) Many students attend more closely to content coverage than to content mastery, perhaps because of teachers' emphasis on procedural directions and lack of emphasis on content-related purposes of the assignments. (2) Emphasis on content coverage in combination with difficult assignments may create a condition in which low achievers develop strategies to complete work without developing strategies that help them make sense of their work. Further data analysis is being conducted to test these two hypotheses. (Author/DB)