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The goal of this study was to examine how students process formative feedback that included corrective and elaborative information in online question-answering tasks. Skilled and less-skilled comprehenders in grade 8 read texts and answered comprehension questions. Prior to responding, students were asked to select the textual information relevant to answer each question. Students received formative feedback that included information about the answer correctness and an elaborative message, either automatically delivered or optionally accessed. Students’ actions, as well as verbal protocols during feedback processing, were recorded. The results showed that: (a) students paid more attention to the answer correctness than to elaborative feedback messages; (b) students paid more attention to feedback information after failure than after success; (c) students actively monitored the accuracy of their responses; and (d) differences between skilled and less-skilled comprehenders in processing feedback were very limited. Theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.

We conducted two experiments to analyze how text availability and question format affect readers’ processes and performance on measures of expository text reading comprehension. Junior high school students read expository texts and answered both multiple choice and open-ended questions on a computer that recorded reading times and readers’ actions with Read&Answer software. The results showed that readers reread prior text segments during initial reading of the text more often when they knew that the text would be unavailable when answering questions than when they knew that the text would be available. In addition, readers made more search decisions in the text- available condition when answering open-ended questions than when answering multiple-choice questions. Regarding performance, we repeatedly found an interaction effect between availability and question format: text availability benefited the open-ended but not the multiple-choice format. We concluded that the two availability conditions are useful in assessing different discourse processes. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for the development of models of reading and new ways to assess reading literacy skills that emphasize purposeful reading.

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 goal of this study was to determine the effect of setting a delay between reading a text and answering comprehension questions on when-to-search and what-to-search decisions in a task-oriented reading environment. Fifty-five eighth-grade students were randomly divided into two groups. One group read one text, answered comprehension questions regarding the text with the text available, and subsequently repeated the procedure with a second text (immediate condition). The other group read both texts first and then answered, with the texts available, the questions for the first text and then for the second text (delayed condition). In both conditions, the readers’ actions during the task were recorded. The results demonstrated that the students in the delayed condition made more search decisions. In addition, moderated mediation analyses indicated that setting a delay had a positive indirect effect on performance via increased searching only for the students with average and high comprehension skills. Moreover, decisions regarding what information to search for depended exclusively on comprehension skill. Instructional implications are discussed.

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 describes an intelligent tutoring system to improve reading literacy skills called TuinLEC and it presents the results of its application to a group of sixth grade students. TuinLEC adopts the reading literacy theoretical framework of PISA (Program for International Students Assessment, OECD, 2009). TuinLEC includes eight lessons distributed in two phases, one for modeling and guided practice, and the second for independent practice. TuinLEC interacts with every student and it provides help and feedback for the task in a game-like environment. Half of the students were taught with TuinLEC, whereas the other half served as the control group. Children in both groups were paired according to reading comprehension scores. We measured students’ reading literacy skills after intervention, which showed that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group. Students who were taught with TuinLEC were also given a questionnaire measuring satisfaction, usability, and self-effica...

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.

The goal of this study is to analyze the self-regulation processes present in task-oriented reading activities. In the 1st experiment, we examined the following self-regulation processes in the context of answering questions about an available text: (a) monitoring the comprehension of the question, (b) self-regulating the search process, and (c) monitoring the decision to search. Skilled and less skilled comprehenders from 7th and 8th grades read 2 texts and answered 16 questions while all their actions were recorded on a computer. We hypothesized that skilled comprehenders would differ from less skilled comprehenders on the 1st 2 processes on the basis of their general comprehension skills but that their superiority in the 3rd process would be based on specific characteristics of the interaction between the reader and the text. The results support our hypotheses. In the 2nd experiment, we hypothesized that monitoring the decision to search would be equivalent to judgments of learning (JOLs). Eighth graders made JOLs before answering every question, and then they decided whether to search the text. Our hypothesis was confirmed. Our study reveals that task-oriented reading places specific demands on readers related to metacognitive monitoring

This article reports on two experiments where undergraduates read five documents on a scientific topic and afterwards answered comprehension questions and wrote either summaries or argument essays on the topic. In the first experiment, students who were instructed to work with the documents for the purpose of summarizing their contents displayed better comprehension and integration of document contents than did students instructed to construct arguments from the documents. In the second experiment, focusing on whether the effects of task instructions on multiple-documents comprehension and integration could be moderated by students’ prior knowledge, it was found that only students with high prior knowledge were able to take advantage of instructions to construct arguments while reading, whereas low-knowledge readers seemed to be more hindered than helped by such task instructions. Theoretical as well as educational implications of these findings are discussed.

One of the major challenges of a knowledge society is that students as well as other citizens must learn to understand and integrate information from multiple textual sources. Still, task and reader characteristics that may facilitate or constrain such intertextual processes are not well understood by researchers. In this study, we compare the effects of summary and argument essay tasks when undergraduates read seven different texts on a particular scientific topic, finding that an instruction to write summaries may lead to better understanding and integration than an instruction to write argument essays. We discuss several possible explanations for this result. We also found that beliefs about the certainty of knowledge in some instances can moderate the effect of task on comprehension performance.

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 article proposes an extension to Kintsch's Construction–Integration (CI) model of text comprehension, which changes its mathematical implementation and emphasizes the connectionist features of the model. Specifically, the extension proposed here (a) simulates the learning process in a connectionist manner by making explicit changes in the connecting values among processing units; (b) takes into account individual differences in prior background knowledge activation and individual ability to make logical inferences, using these parameters to adjust the results of the simulation; and (c) implements an algorithm that constructs the connectivity matrix W from text processing. The proposed extension is tested on existing recall and contradiction-detection data from readers of science texts, and its predictions fit the empirical data better than the CI model's prediction.

The goal of this study was to compare 2 approaches for improving instructional text. The first was based on the procedure created by B. K. Britton and S. Gulgoz (1991) as derived from W. Kintsch and T. A. van Dijk's theory (1978). It emphasized the reduction of the reader's inferential activity. We created a second method that was inspired by theories of narrative comprehension (P. van den Broek, 1990; A. C. Graesser, M. Singer, & T. Trabasso, 1994). We oriented it toward triggering causal inferences in the reader. Alternative versions of an original passage on history were elaborated for each of the 2 methods. Sixty-four 8th graders read either the original passage or one of the revised versions and were tested on memory (i.e., recall) and learning (i.e., inference questions). Only the 2nd procedure produced benefits on inferential learning, though both procedures had a limited effect on recall.

This research investigates the role played on shallow and deep levels of comprehension by textual changes that are aimed at: (a) improving the relationships within text ideas, and (b) producing better links between text ideas and the reader's knowledge. Four versions of a long physics passage were elaborated combining both kinds of textual changes. Four groups of tenth graders were each given one of the four versions. Different measures representative of these levels of comprehension were taken: getting main ideas, recall, and problem solving. The results indicated that: (a) main idea performance was affected by improving the relationships within text ideas, (b) both textual changes contributed separately to recall, and (c) problem solving increased only when the two changes were presented together.

This paper describes a long-term research in which middle-grade school children were taught how to represent visually text key ideas through idea-mapping techniques. It consists of three studies, one for each year of our research. Children were at sixth grade when the instruction began, and they were at eighth grade when it finished. Another group of children from a different public school served as control group. Instruction was very close to the real school conditions: instructors were ordinary teachers, instruction was inserted in the content area curriculum, and ordinary textbooks were regularly employed, though combined with specially elaborated materials. Results were positive in the case of the first and third year, depending on instructional conditions. Positive effects were found on recall, comprehension and learning, but they were different in the three studies. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Qualitative methods that analyze the coherence of expository texts not only are time consuming, but also present challenges in collecting data on coding reliability. We describe software that analyzes expository texts more rapidly and produces a notable level of objectivity. ETAT (Expository Text Analysis Tool) analyzes the coherence of expository texts. ETAT adopts a symbolic representational system, known as conceptual graph structures. ETAT follows three steps: segmentation of a text into nodes, classification of the unidentified nodes, and linking the nodes with relational arcs. ETAT automatically constructs a graph in the form of nodes and their interrelationships, along with various attendant statistics and information about noninterrelated, isolated nodes. ETAT was developed in Java, so it is compatible with virtually all computer systems.