Contextual factors that affect adolescents' detection of and memory for conflicts across multiple texts

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.