The Role of General and Selective Task Instructions on Students' Processing of Multiple Conflicting Documents.

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.

El papel de las instrucciones de perspectiva en el uso de documentos múltiples para resolver una tarea abierta / The role of perspective on students' use of multiple documents to solve an openended task

McCrudden & Schraw (2007) muestran cómo las instrucciones de perspectiva asignada promueven a los lectores a utilizar el conocimiento previo cuando interaccionan con un texto. La investigación realizada en textos individuales ha demostrado que los lectores otorgan relevancia a segmentos del texto que son consistentes con la perspectiva asignada (Pichert y Anderson, 1977). Este trabajo ha puesto a prueba los efectos de la perspectiva cuando se lee información contradictoria de múltiples documentos, al igual que ha estudiados i la fiabilidad de una fuente ejerce alguna influencia en la decisión de los estudiantes de cara a utilizarla información de un documento en particular. Los resultados indican que la lectura de varios documentos se ve influenciada no sólo por las instrucciones de perspectiva, sino que también pueden ayudar a los estudiantes a ser más discriminativos a la hora de decidir entre mayor o menor credibilidad de los documentos (AU)

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 know ledge 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 trust worthy documents (AU)

Self-generated explanations on the question demands are not always helpful.

This study had two main purposes. First, to measure high-school students' task model representation under the instruction to self-explain questions; second, to test the effects of self-generated explanations on task-demands understanding and performance on questions. We designed a simple experimental situation where high-school students were asked to read two texts and answer questions. Only in half of the questions students were required to self-explain with their own words what the question was asking them for before answering. Contrary to our expectations, self-explaining the questions did not significantly affect skilled comprehenders, whereas it hindered performance in less-skilled comprehenders. Moreover, it inhibited their active engagement in search for textual units of information. Less-skilled comprehenders' explanation protocols included inaccuracies, with consequences on the search process and success in the task. The relationship among quality of task model, search for information and success is discussed in light of the TRACE model (Rouet, 2006).

Self-generated explanations on the question demands are not always helpful

This study had two main purposes. First, to measure high-school students’ task model representation under the instruction to self-explain questions; second, to test the effects of self-generated explanations on task-demands understanding and performance on questions. We designed a simple experimental situation where high-school students were asked to read two texts and answer questions. Only in half of the questions students were required to self-explain with their own words what the question was asking them for before answering. Contrary to our expectations, self-explaining the questions did not significantly affect skilled comprehenders, whereas it hindered performance in less-skilled comprehenders. Moreover, it inhibited their active engagement in search for textual units of information. Less-skilled comprehenders’ explanation protocols included inaccuracies, with consequences on the search process and success in the task. The relationship among quality of task model, search for information and success is discussed in light of the TRACE model (Rouet, 2006) (AU)

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Recording online processes in task-oriented reading with Read&Answer.

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.