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Comprehension substantially benefits from attending to, thinking about, and mentally representing the sources of any presented information. Such processes require mental effort and unfortunately pe...

The current work was conducted to better understand the influences of source presence and individual differences on evaluating and sharing information from multiple conflicting Internet texts about...

Background School-aged children are increasingly engaging with multiple conflicting texts to understand complex societal issues; however, empirical research has not yet examined in what ways contextual factors affect detection of and memory for conflicts. Methods The current experiment manipulated contextual factors that included the vocabulary terms that authors of different texts used when describing the same concepts and the order with which students accessed contradictory information. Results After controlling for general science knowledge, adolescent students displayed longer reading times when contradictory stances were presented in an alternating fashion than they did when texts were blocked by stance. When text presentation was alternating, students also remembered more conflicts when the texts used the same vocabulary terms than they did when the texts used different vocabulary terms (non-obvious synonyms). However, when adolescents read texts blocked by stance, they remembered a similar number of intertextual conflicts regardless of whether texts used the same or different vocabulary. Conclusion The findings suggest that different contextual factors can facilitate (but also undermine) propensities to notice and remember conflicts across texts. As such, the findings have important implications for theories of text comprehension and applications for adolescents' everyday reading experiences.

Articles in this special issue — How adolescents read and learn on the Web: internal and external factors — provide compelling new empirical evidence on a suite of internal and external fac...

This study examined relationships between several individual differences measures and belief revision after reading a text refuting common misconceptions about childhood vaccinations. Individual di...

This chapter focuses on readers’ processing of discrepant information that might be encountered within a single text, between multiple texts, or when content conflicts with the reader’s prior knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes. Based on theoretical models of single and multiple text comprehension, we describe the cognitive processes in which readers engage when they experience cognitive conflict, and when they engage in strategies that serve to re-establish cognitive equilibrium. We focus specifically on the role that sourcing strategies play at different stages of processing, including in attributing the origin of cognitive conflict, in explaining why a discrepancy has occurred, in resolving coherence breaks by evaluating each source’s credibility, and in mentally representing conflicting perspectives. Based on our conceptual and empirical analysis, we discuss implications for adapting current theoretical models to consider readers’ attention to, and evaluation and representation of source perspectives, and we consider how the mechanisms described could be tested empirically.

One consistent impediment to college students' performance in statistics courses is statistics anxiety. However, people who endorse intelligence growth mindsets report lower statistics anxiety and achieve higher grades. We examined whether adopting a self-compassion growth mindset was an antecedent to an intelligence growth mindset, reduced statistics anxiety, and ultimately, lead to better grades. Ninety undergraduate students who took an Introductory Research Methods and Statistics course at a mid-south university reported their implicit theories of self-compassion and intelligence, statistics anxiety, and demographic information twice during the semester. Final grade percentages were obtained directly from the course instructor after the semester concluded. The results demonstrated a serial indirect effect of self-compassion growth mindset affecting the final grade received, first through intelligence growth mindset and then through statistics anxiety. Alternative serial indirect effect models were conducted, but none were significant. Implications of these results for the broader implicit theories, statistics anxiety literature, and education were discussed.

Despite the importance of source attention and evaluation for learning from texts, little is known about the particular conditions that encourage sourcing during reading. In this article, basic assumptions of the discrepancy-induced source comprehension (D-ISC) model are presented, which describes the moment-by-moment cognitive processes that readers undergo when reading-to-understand controversial messages. We then review supporting evidence from single and multiple text comprehension research. In the discussion, we draw conclusions based on the theoretical and empirical research, highlight limitations of what is known to date, and suggest how further investigations of D-ISC might address these concerns. The final version of this research has been published in Educational Psychologist. © 2017 Taylor & Francis

Refutation texts have been previously shown to be effective at promoting knowledge revision. The current study builds on recent trends to gain deeper insights into how this learning advantage can be enhanced and extended to more learners. In particular, we examined whether distinct epistemic profiles can be discerned on the basis of individuals’ beliefs about justification for knowing (i.e., justification by authority, personal opinion, or multiple sources) in the natural sciences. Further, we designed refutation texts according to this trichotomous framework of epistemic justification. We tested whether profiles stronger in certain dimensions would attain higher learning scores over others and whether consistency between profiles and texts would confer a learning advantage compared to when these factors were inconsistent. Results showed that distinct epistemic profiles are discernable and a profile with stronger preference for justification by multiple sources, authority, and lower preference for justification by personal opinion in natural science attained higher learning scores. Further, higher learning scores were observed when refutation texts justified by authoritative explanations were consistent with one cluster dominant in preference for justification by authority. Theoretical and instructional design implications are discussed.

Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to assess the influence of words either looking like the target word (orthographic distractors) or semantically related to the target word (semantic distractors) on visual search for words within lists by adolescents of 11, 13, and 15 years of age. In Experiment 1 (literal search task), participants saw the target word before the search (e.g., “raven”), whereas in Experiment 2 (categorical task) the target word was only defined by its semantic category (e.g., “bird”). In both experiments, participants’ search times decreased from fifth to ninth grade, both because older adolescents gazed less often at non-target words during the search and because they could reject non-target words more quickly once they were fixated. Progress in visual search efficiency was associated with a large increase in word identification skills, which were a strong determinant of average gaze durations and search times for the categorical task, but much less for the literal task. In the literal task, the presence of orthographic or semantic distractors in the list increased search times for all age groups. In the categorical task, the impact of semantic distractor words was stronger than in the literal task because participants needed to gaze at the semantic distractors longer than at the other words before rejecting them. Altogether, the data support the assumption that the progressive automation of word decoding up until the age of 12 and the better quality of older adolescents’ lexical representations facilitate a flexible use of both the perceptual and semantic features of words for top-down guidance within the displays. In particular, older adolescents were better prepared to aim at or reject words without gazing at them directly. Finally, the overall similar progression of the maturation of single word visual search processes and that of more real-life information search within complex verbal documents suggests that the young adolescents’ difficulties in searching the Web effectively could be due to their insufficiently developed lexical representations and word decoding abilities.

The current experiments systematically examined semantic content integration as a mechanism for explaining source inattention and forgetting when reading-to-remember multiple texts. For all 3 experiments, degree of semantic overlap was manipulated amongst messages provided by various information sources. In Experiment 1, readers’ source recognition was significantly poorer when the sources presented semantically-congruent compared to semantically-distinct messages. Experiment 2 replicated the findings, despite half of the participants receiving a pre-reading warning. Experiment 3 extended the examination to include longer argument-based texts; readers additionally wrote a comprehensive essay on the topic. The results indicated longer reading times and better recall memory for the claims and evidence statements from semantically-congruent compared to semantically-distinct texts, while still reproducing the poorer source recognition effects of Experiments 1 and 2. We discuss implications for contemporary accounts of multiple text comprehension as well as directions for future research.

A refutation text is designed to promote conceptual change by explicitly acknowledging commonly held misconceptions about a topic, directly refuting them, and providing an accurate explanation. In this study, we determined the impact of different types of refutation texts on adolescent readers’ conceptual change learning in science. Specifically, we manipulated the way the correct conception was justified and explained following work in epistemic cognition. Three different types of justification were compared to a control condition: justification by authority, justification by multiple sources, and justification by personal opinion. The findings showed that learning effects were optimized when the correct conceptions were presented in terms of a corroborated consensus among multiple sources.

We examined how writing cover letters to the instructor influenced final papers in research methods courses. After receiving instructor feedback on drafts of each section of an American Psychological Association style research paper throughout the semester, students in two classes wrote cover letters to the instructor explaining how the instructor feedback was incorporated into their final paper. Students in the two control classes received the same type of feedback throughout the semester but were not required to write cover letters. Students enrolled in the cover letter classes showed more improvement in the quality of their papers than the students in the control classes. Using cover letters to articulate how feedback is being incorporated may help students more efficiently organize and respond to instructor feedback. Future researchers might investigate whether students’ reflective ability is a significant moderator in effective feedback utilization.

In the twenty-first-century information society, student readers can draw on a wealth of resources available through a variety of print and digital technologies when seeking well-grounded answers to crucial socio-scientific issues. However, this requires that students integrate information from source materials expressing diverse and even contradictory viewpoints, with the credibility of those sources often a key issue. In this chapter, we argue that one path to improving students’ critical reading and learning is through developing their source evaluation skills, that is, their ability to judge the credibility or trustworthiness of sources by attending to available or accessible information about the source, such as who authored it or what kind of source it is. After discussing pertinent theoretical frameworks, we review several related strands of research concerning students’ source evaluation skills and suggest directions for future research on how individual and textual factors, separately and in concert, may contribute to students’ source evaluation practices, on how judgments of source credibility are related to judgments of content relevance, and on how effective and efficient instruction targeting source evaluation skills can be designed and evaluated.

Students read six documents that varied in terms of their perspectives on a scientific issue and the trustworthiness of the source features. After reading, students wrote essays, rank-ordered the documents according to perceived trustworthiness, and provided reasons for their rank-order decisions. Students put the most trust in a textbook and a public information text, primarily giving content reasons for their trustworthiness judgments. The kind of source characteristics that students drew upon when deciding what to trust and what not to trust varied across documents. Finally, their source evaluation was related to the source citations included in their essays.

This study examined implicit theories of intelligence as predictors of multiple document comprehension in a sample of 59 Norwegian upper-secondary school students. In four multiple regression analyses with multiple document comprehension indicated by students' inclusion of scientific concepts in their essays, discrimination between more and less useful documents given the reading task, consideration of document trustworthiness as a basis for making those discriminations, and ability to draw inferences across documents as outcome measures, beliefs in intelligence as a malleable, increasable quality emerged as a unique positive predictor after controlling for word recognition, prior knowledge, and working memory. However, beliefs in intelligence as a fixed, unchangeable quantity did not emerge as a unique negative predictor. The findings indicate that the benefits of endorsing an incremental theory of intelligence may be more pronounced than the costs of endorsing an entity theory of intelligence in complex reading task contexts.

We investigated whether memory for scientific arguments and their sources were affected by the appropriateness of the claim–evidence relationship. Undergraduates read health articles in one of four conditions derived by crossing claim type (causal with definite qualifier, associative with tentative qualifier) and evidence type (experimental, correlational). This manipulation produced articles that overstated the results of a study and articles that understated their results, along with appropriate controls for each. We found that evidence and, to a lesser extent, source information was recalled more poorly for articles that overstated results (i.e., causal claims using correlational evidence) than for those where evidence was appropriate (i.e., causal claim with experimental evidence). Readers rejected these overstatements based on the study design rather than reprocessing the text. In contrast, understatements (tentative claim, experimental evidence) were recalled just as well as their appropriate contro...

© 2013 American Psychological Association. This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record. The original publication is available at www.apa.org; DOI: 10.1037/a0032627

The current research examined whether instructional activities centering on contrasting cases promoted secondary school students’ evaluations of source features present in a multiple-documents inquiry context. Two hypothetical students’ document evaluation strategy protocols were designed: One featured more sophisticated strategies commonly enacted by experts and better college students and a second featured less sophisticated strategies commonly enacted by secondary school students. A series of classroom-based activities required that students compare/contrast the two protocols to decide which were the best strategies when analyzing multiple scientific documents and why. The findings demonstrated that students who previously participated in the intervention activities included more scientific concepts from more useful documents when generating essay responses from memory, displayed better rankings of the usefulness of the set of multiple documents, and offered more principled justifications based on source feature evaluations of trustworthiness compared to students who instead received typical classroom instruction. We discuss the instructional implications of a contrasting-cases approach in facilitating secondary school students’ usage of source features within multiple-documents inquiry contexts.

The present research investigated whether real-world application exercises promoted students’ abilities to spontaneously transfer statistical knowledge and to recognize the use of statistics in real-world contexts. Over the course of a semester of psychological statistics, two classes completed multiple application exercises designed to mimic real-world contexts; three control classes did not complete the exercises. At the end of the semester, all classes completed questions to assess transfer of statistical knowledge and answered a question that addressed how statistics apply to their everyday lives. Results indicated that students who previously participated in the application exercise activities displayed a greater usage of statistical knowledge when answering far-transfer questions and mentioned real-world applications of statistics more often compared to control students. We discuss the implications of transfer-promoting interventions in equipping students with statistical knowledge that they can flexibly apply in more real-world situations.

International audience; In two experiments, we examined fourth and fifth graders' comprehension of the source of information in texts presenting controversial issues. In Experiment 1, participants read short texts in which two people presented different arguments regarding an issue. Participants identified who said what and evaluated each source's knowledge of the issue. Most students correctly identified the source of information but failed to take into account each source's characteristics when determining who was most knowledgeable. In Experiment 2, we implemented an intervention on students' evaluations of information sources. Less skilled students in the intervention group assessed source knowledge more accurately than those in a control group. We conclude that elementary school students' comprehension of who says what in a text can benefit from training sessions that involve practice, feedback, explanations, and discussions. We consider the implications for document-based learning in elementary and secondary education.

This study investigated note-taking during multiple-text reading across two different task conditions in relation to comprehension performance and self-reports of strategy use. Forty-four undergraduates read multiple texts about climate change to write an argument or a summary. Analysis of students’ spontaneous note-taking during reading showed that intertextual elaboration strategies, as indicated by the notes, were related to deeper-level, integrated comprehension for students reading to construct an argument, whereas no such relationship was observed for students reading to summarise information. Relations between note-taking and self-reporting of strategies suggested a heightened awareness of strategy use among students reading to construct an argument, with this, possibly, explaining why their note-taking strategies accounted for variance in their comprehension performance. Discussion focuses on the unique contributions of the current work to multiple-text strategy research.

Two experiments examined whether inconsistent effects of analogies in promoting new content learning from text are related to prior knowledge of the analogy per se. In Experiment 1, college students who demonstrated little understanding of weather systems and different levels of prior knowledge (more vs. less) of an analogous everyday situation read a text about weather systems that included the analogy or a control version that did not. Results indicated that those with more prior knowledge of the analogy performed better on weather system learning measures (sentence verification and number of concepts in essays). Prior knowledge of the analogous domain interacted with presence of the analogy in the text on 1 learning measure: Those with more prior knowledge who read the analogy text had fewer misconceptions in their conceptual models of weather than those who read the control text. Think-aloud protocols collected in Experiment 2 suggested that analogies in the text constrained prior knowledge activation...

The present investigation examined middle school students' evaluations of the usefulness for addressing a social studies inquiry question of a variety of sources of information, and the basis of these judgments. This task situation simulates an early phase of information gathering and selection in the context of inquiry. For each of nine sources, students were provided with, and asked to rate, the usefulness of six attributes (i.e. title, author, venue, date, type of publication, and a two-three sentence content summary) and the overall usefulness of each source. The sources varied in usefulness as determined by expert ratings. Students' overall ratings showed that some clearly differentiated the usefulness of the sources while others did not. Analyses of the ratings of individual attributes indicated that “higher” differentiators primarily considered content indicators (i.e., title and summary) when making usefulness judgments; “lower” differentiators considered author and venue of publication, with much less emphasis on source content. Discussion focuses on the instructional and practical implications of skill at differentiating more from less useful sources of information during initial information gathering and selecting in the context of 21st century Internet resources.

International audience; Two experiments examined readers' memory for information sources in short news stories. Based on current theories of text comprehension, we assumed that sources involved in the situation described (e.g. a witness or a participant) would be better remembered than remote sources (e.g. someone commenting on the topic from a distance). We additionally tested the assumption that less plausible stories would enhance readers' memory for remote information sources. Experiment 1 found that readers remembered sources involved in the situation better than remote sources. Although sources of less plausible stories were not better remembered than sources of more plausible stories, implausible details were. In Experiment 2, source-focusing instructions increased readers' memory for sources but did not affect the overall pattern of effects. We discuss the findings with respect to theories of text comprehension and knowledge elaboration. We conclude that comprehension theories and task-oriented reading theories can be extended to account for the encoding of source as well as content information.

Over a decade ago, we worked with Charles Perfetti to create a framework (Britt, Perfetti, Sandak, & Rouet, 1999; Perfetti, Rouet, & Britt, 1999; Rouet, 2006) that extends the situation model theory of text comprehension (Kintsch, 1988; Zwaan, Langston, & Graesser, 1995) to encompass multiple document learning situations. Our efforts were motivated by three observations. First, when engaging in in-depth learning, students read multiple accounts of the same situation and must reconcile agreements and discrepancies in those accounts. Reading multiple texts requires integration mechanisms that go beyond the construction of a model of a single author’s description of a situation. The documents might provide discrepant accounts of a particular event. To maintain a coherent representation, a reader must either dismiss one of the accounts (i.e., purposefully ignore some information) or somehow represent the discrepancies and account for why two sources would provide different explanations (i.e., generate inferences about authors’ knowledge or motives). Neither of these mechanisms is accounted for in coherence-based models of comprehension (Lorch & O’Brien, 1995; Zwaan & Singer, 2003). Our second observation was that authors can be both sources of documents and actors in a described situation. For example, in U.S. President Roosevelt’s memoirs, he is both an author and an actor. Additionally, authors themselves may be explicitly mentioned in a document. For example, historians cite Roosevelt’s memoirs when writing about the events during his presidency. Thus, a reader must be able to representationally distinguish between authors as sources and authors as agents and deal with their various levels of knowledge and trustworthiness. By their very nature, documents present a situation from the perspectives of its authors. Content often cannot be simply added to a representation withouttaking the author information into account. Finally, our third observation was that there is more to a source than the identity of the author. Other parameters that characterize the origin of the docu ment (e.g., date, publisher, context during writing) can also affect one’s comprehension of the message. We subsume all of these parameters under the construct of “source” (e.g., author and document parameters). These observations led us to propose the Documents Model framework, to describe additional representational structures (and later mechanisms) that account for comprehension in a multiple document learning situation. The Documents Model framework extends the situation model theory by adding knowledge structures that represent sources of information and links them to situation model content, other sources and, through them, representations of alternative situations. In addition to representing content (e.g., spatiotemporal events and causal-temporal relations), the framework describes an Intertext Model in which sources may be explicitly represented as Document Nodes and connected through intertext links to situation model content or to other Document Nodes. For example, the most salient information about the source of Web Text 1 (Figure 11.1) may be that it is an article about the benefits of Global Warming obtained from a website named foodstuff.org. In the reader’s representation, a Document Node for this Web Text might include document characteristics (Web article from foodstuff.org, posted December 2010) and author characteristics (author named “admin,” National ConsumerResource for Agriculture). It may also include evaluations of the document or author (e.g., includes a scientific-looking illustration, corporate author name seems like an industry-sponsored “grass-roots” organization). The Document Node may be related to salient content information provided on the Web page, through source-to-content links, such as “According to foodstuff.org, global warming entails some benefits.” In addition to Document Nodes and source-to-content links, the Intertext Model also allows for source-to-source links. For example, the reader may link their Document Node for Web Text 1 (“benefits of global warming”) to their Document Node for Web Text 2 (in Figure 11.2) (“threats of global warming”) with an “opposes” link. See Figure 11.3 for a schematic of a Documents Model for these two Web Texts. Document Nodes may also link to other situation models. When learning from multiple documents on the same topic, readers are trying to understand the situation described across the various sources. In most cases, however, the authors present varying or partial accounts that one might not fully accept. Sometimes these accounts may be dismissed and ignored. There are other occasions when such alternatives must be represented and related to each other.Secondary history texts, for example, frequently present alternative explanations for an event by attributing them to specific historians. Intertext links provide a way to relate alternative models of a situation. We originally referred to this meta-level representation as the Situations Model to highlight the fact that multiple situations were represented in the history texts we studied (Perfetti et al., 1999). However, in an effort to extend the framework to science texts that describe natural phenomena, we now refer to one’s understanding of the unique, overlapping, and conflicting information mentioned in all the texts as the Integrated Mental Model (Britt & Rouet, 2012; Wiley, Britt, Griffin, Steffens, & Project READi, 2012). During the past decade, there has been a growing interest in multiple text comprehension and frameworks such as the Documents Model (see e.g., Braten, Britt, Stromso, & Rouet, 2011; Rouet, 2006). The view that, when deeply engaged in document-based learning tasks, readers need to represent source features and integrate across sources has received an increasing amount of empirical support (Britt & Aglinskas, 2002; Britt et al., 1999; Kobayashi, 2009; Rouet, Favart, Britt, & Perfetti, 1997; Stahl, Hynd, Britton, McNish, & Bosquet, 1996; Stadtler & Bromme, 2007; Stromso, Braten, & Britt, 2010; Wiley & Voss, 1999; Wineburg, 1991). Yet the Documents Model framework, as initially proposed, was a rather general and descriptive framework. In this chapter we seek to examine in greater detail one of its key assumptions, the document-as-entity assumption. Our purpose is to demonstrate the heuristic value of this assumption and how it may provide explanatory mechanisms for a range of observations that

International audience; In two experiments, we examined the role of discrepancy on readers’ text processing of and memory for the sources of brief news reports. Each story included two assertions that were attributed to different sources. We manipulated whether the second assertion was either discrepant or consistent with the first assertion. On the basis of the discrepancy-induced source comprehension (D-ISC) assumption, we predicted that discrepant stories would promote deeper processing and better memory for the sources conveying the messages, as compared to consistent stories. As predicted, readers mentioned more sources in summaries of discrepant stories, recalled more sources, made more fixations, and displayed longer gaze times in source areas when reading discrepant than when reading consistent stories. In Experiment 2, we found enhanced memory for source–content links for discrepant stories even when intersentential connectors were absent, and regardless of the reading goals. Discussion was focused on discrepancies as one mechanism by which readers are prompted to encode source–content links more deeply, as a method of integrating disparate pieces of information into a coherent mental representation of a text.