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International audience; Background: Drawing on theories of purposeful reading, this study explored task conditions that support fifth graders' selective reading of documents in order to answer questions. More specifically, we investigated whether promoting students' elaboration of their task model increases task performance. Methods: Participants had to answer series of questions by searching documents for the relevant information. Half the participants received a task model prompt, and half received a control prompt. Participants' eye movements were recorded during text search, in order to investigate more precisely the effect of an enhanced task model. Results: Participants provided more correct answers in the task model condition than in the control condition, but there was no difference in response time. Unexpectedly, eye movement analysis did not reveal any differences between conditions concerning the number of visits and visit time to relevant and irrelevant areas of the document.

This study was designed to test the role of general and selective task instructions when processing documents, which vary as regards trustworthiness and position toward a conflicting topic. With selective task instructions, we refer to concrete guidelines as how to read the texts and how to select appropriate documents and contents, in contrast to general task instructions. Sixty-one secondary school students were presented with four different conflicting documents in an electronic learning environment and were told to write an essay based on the information from the texts. Only half of the students were told to only use information from two out of the four texts to write their essay (i.e., selective condition). As predicted, students told to focus on specific documents and not use all of them for the assigned task (i.e., selective condition) better discriminated the quality of documents and type of information for the task.

International audience; The present study investigates the effectiveness of question paraphrases in supporting students' understanding of a specific task. Secondary school students (i.e., eighth grade) read two texts and answered several questions while texts were available. A paraphrase including core information about each question was included before students provided their answer. Individual differences in reading comprehension explained the beneficial effect of paraphrases. Concretely, the presentation of paraphrases improved the performance of less-skilled but not skilled comprehenders. These findings are discussed in terms of the processes involved in task model formation and individual differences underlying these processes.

The study includes two experiments to analyse the effects of automatic formative feedback designed to promote the transfer of self-regulation of strategic decisions in task-oriented reading e.g. answering questions from an available text. Secondary-school students read and answered multiple-choice comprehension questions from two texts having them available while receiving consistent feedback about their performance and strategic decisions. Then, they read a different text and answered questions also with the text available, but receiving no feedback. In Experiment 1, we tested two feedback procedures that differed in task conditions and the feedback information associated to these conditions. The most effective was a procedure that forced students to select relevant text information to answer each question and provided accurate feedback based on that selection. Experiment 2 was designed to disentangle the role played by the selection task from that played by the feedback provided. We found that the two components contribute to transfer the self-regulation strategies, although each one has a specific role for different strategies. Theoretical and practical implications of the studies are discussed.

This study analyses the efficacy of formative feedback to boost students’ search behaviour when answering comprehension questions in a with-text reading situation, which is a common reading situation in instructional and assessment settings. In these reading situations search strategies play an important role to predict students’ performance. Sixty-five high school students read two texts and answered eight multiple-choice comprehension questions per text using the software Read&Answer, which recorded all the students’ actions. After answering each question, students received either global-search-feedback or specific-search-feedback, which differed in the specificity of their information, or no-feedback. Participants who received any feedback had a second chance to correct their wrong answers. Specific-search-feedback increased students’ search decisions and improved their use of relevant information to repair wrong answers over global-search-feedback. Consequently, specific-search-feedback improv...

This study had two main purposes. First, to test how the availability of documents in multiple document reading might affect students’ levels of cognitive load. Secondly, to develop an instrument that captures the different sources of load when working with multiple documents. A total of 125 secondary school students read four short texts on transgenic foods and subsequently responded to an open-ended question that required them to write an essay expressing their personal stance towards the topic. Participants in the experimental treatment condition (n = 54) were allowed to go back to the texts any time during the essay task, whereas their peers in the control condition (n = 71) were not allowed to do so. As hypothesized through the lens of cognitive load theory, the cognitive load arising from cognitive processes that in themselves do not contribute to learning (i.e., extraneous cognitive load) was somewhat lower in the experimental treatment condition, probably due to split attention effects in the control condition. However, no statistically significant differences were found in perceived task complexity or learning task performance. A reliable instrument to measure different sources of intrinsic and extraneous load in multiple document reading is provided. Implications of these findings for future research are discussed.

This study analyses the effectiveness of adaptive formative feedback to boost strategic search decisions and performance when students are asked to answer a set of questions in a task-oriented reading situation. We compared automatic feedback that included information about the right answer with feedback that also included the connection between the students' strategic search decisions and their performance. Ninety-two high school students read two non-continuous texts. They received feedback during a training phase, and then they read and also received feedback with a similar text in a final phase. Text and questions were presented using a new computer-based technology that provided automatic adaptive feedback depending on the experimental condition: right-answer feedback, strategic-search-decisions feedback and placebo feedback. We found that strategic-search-decisions feedback improved strategic decisions over right-answer and placebo feedback in the final text, which in turn improved question-answering performance. Some positive effects were also found during training. These results open new possibilities to adaptive automatic procedures to teach task-oriented reading skills to students.

McCrudden & Schraw (2007) show how students’ interaction with a text is mediated by the instructions they are presented with. Specifically, perspective instructions prompt readers to use background knowledge to evaluate text from an assigned point of view. Research on perspective in single texts has demonstrated that readers confer relevance on text segments that are consistent with the assigned perspective (Pichert & Anderson, 1977). This work has tested the effects of perspective when reading conflicting information from multiple documents to perform an open-ended task, as well as has studied if the trustworthiness of a source exerts any influence on students’ decision to use information from a particular document. Results indicate that students’ reading of multiple documents is influenced by perspective instructions, which, in turn, can help students be more discriminative when deciding between more and less trustworthy documents.

People often read to fulfill the requirement of a task that demands comprehension, which can be called task-oriented reading. Task- oriented reading activities are associated with reading literacy competencies promoted by international reading literacy assessment programs and definitions of reading skills that emphasize the role of the reader, the tasks, and the social context in reading. Task- oriented reading situations place specific self-regulatory demands on readers that go beyond the scope of comprehension processes considered by current theories and models of comprehension. Read&Answer is an application developed to record actions and reading time on task-oriented situations in an electronic environment. In this paper we describe Read&Answer and summarize studies on the impact that tasks of different nature have on how readers interact with a text and their final performance, as well as some strategies specific to task-oriented reading situations.

The purpose of the study was to explore students’ selection of information strategies in a task-oriented reading situation. 72 secondary school students read two texts and answered six questions per text, three of which were manipulated to induce a misleading matching between the wording of the question and distracting pieces of information in the text. The reading and question-answering were presented with the software Read&Answer. We analyzed how skilled and less-skilled comprehenders were attracted to the distracting pieces of information and how this affected reading patterns and task outcomes. Skilled comprehenders scored higher and were able to discard the distracting information. In contrast, less-skilled comprehenders copied and processed this information in more detail. On-line data provided evidence for these behaviors. These results suggest that skilled comprehension facilitates the use of idea-based selection of information strategies, whereas less-skilled comprehension induces the inappropriate use of word-matching selection of information strategies.

We present an application to study task-oriented reading processes called Read&Answer. The application mimics paper-and-pencil situations in which a reader interacts with one or more documents to perform a specific task, such as answering questions, writing an essay, or similar activities. Read&Answer presents documents and questions with a mask. The reader unmasks documents and questions so that only a piece of information is available at a time. This way the entire interaction between the reader and the documents on the task is recorded and can be analyzed. We describe Read&Answer and present its applications for research and assessment. Finally, we explain two studies that compare readers' performance on Read&Answer with students' reading times and comprehension levels on a paper-and-pencil task, and on a computer task recorded with eye-tracking. The use of Read&Answer produced similar comprehension scores, although it changed the pattern of reading times.

This study examined the effect of (a) high- and low-level questions and (b) reading the text before the questions asked on performance, delayed text recall, and deep text comprehension, as well as on specific text-inspection patterns. Participants were 37 undergraduate students who answered either high- or low-level questions using the software Read&Answer to read and answer questions on the computer screen. Additionally, half of the sample read first a text and then answered the questions (reading-first condition), whereas the other half answered the questions without having read the text in advance (no-reading-first condition). All participants had the text available to search for the answer. Results indicated that high-level questions facilitated deep comprehension but not immediate performance or delayed recall of text, independently of the reading condition, and that high- and low-level questions differentially affected text-inspection patterns.

This paper is aimed at presenting Read&Answer, a tool that records reading times, one of the main on-line methods employed in text processing research. Read&Answer allows the recording, analysis and interpretation of the learner processing in order to test specific hypotheses and explain final comprehension results. First, we will describe the tool, and then we will briefly explain some research studies using the tool. We will show how Read&Answer can be used in combination with another on-line method extensively employed in text processing research, i.e., verbal protocols, and we will also compare Read&Answer with eye movement tracking, a widely accepted on-line reading times technique.

The authors examine 2 issues: (a) how students integrate information from multiple scientific documents to describe and explain a physical phenomenon that represents a subset of the information in the documents; and (b) the role of 2 sorts of tasks to achieve this type of integration, either writing an essay on a question requiring integration across texts or answering shorter intratext questions that require students to integrate information within a single text, while superficial and deep comprehension measurements are obtained. Undergraduate students answered 1 of the 2 types of questions, and their reading times were recorded. Half of the sample thought aloud. Results showed that the integration question increased integration and decreased the processing of isolated units of information, which enhanced deep learning, whereas no differences between the 2 sorts of tasks on memory recall were apparent. This research also provides evidence for the discrepancy between training and posttraining effects (R. A. Schmidt & R. A. Bjork, 1992).