ABSTRACT. A key feature of the literature on learning from multiple texts has been its persistent drive to characterize and analyze the complexity of everyday reading – including examining students’ navigation of a multitude of sources, simultaneously presented, but of varying quality and potentially inconsistent or in conflict with one another, typical of reading on the Internet. Still, a critical aspect of everyday reading that the literature of multiple text learning has largely failed to address is how students use (multiple) texts to understand and take action on complex social issues – including issues of social justice and systematic inequity. This talk will draw on the literatures on culturally relevant pedagogy, media and digital literacy, and learning from multiple texts to examine how introducing students to multiple texts can be used as a means of fostering reasoning about issues of equity. Additionally, data will be presented demonstrating that students are both capable of and challenged by such reasoning, suggesting areas for future inquiry.

ABSTRACT. The purpose of this study was to examine if reading purpose varied the effect of reading medium on comprehension and accuracy of perceived comprehension. Undergraduate students (N = 133) were randomly assigned to reading purposes of study or entertainment as well as reading from paper or screens. Neither reading medium nor purpose had reliable differences in accuracy of comprehension nor perceived comprehension. Reading from one’s preferred medium was related to more accurate perceived comprehension.

ABSTRACT. While some comprehension questions ask readers to make new connections within the concepts of a text, others ask students to reason beyond it. An initial study found worse performance on the latter type, and readers perceived them to be more difficult. A follow-up interview study examined the factors that contributed to this difficulty and suggested that readers may lack a schema for how to answer inference questions that require them to reason beyond the text.

ABSTRACT. Think-aloud studies have shown that students tend to fall into processing profiles that can drive scaffolding and feedback. The current study used k-means clustering of constructed responses to identify profiles of high school readers’ strategy use. We found that production of paraphrases, bridging inferences, and switches between strategies could be used to develop four different profiles of comprehenders. Further analysis revealed that these patterns of behavior were related to participants’ reading skill and prior knowledge.

ABSTRACT. Believers and disbelievers in gun control effectiveness wrote a 250 word essay explaining their beliefs after reading a one-sided text that was either consistent or inconsistent with their beliefs. Essays were coded for number of reasons and the presence or absence of a claim, counterargument, text content, policy claim, metacognitive statement, and evaluative statement about the text. Between group differences in essay characteristics and how they relate as a function of belief change are discussed.

ABSTRACT. This study investigated the independent and interactive effects of self-explanation instructions and purpose instructions (i.e., providing information about post-reading assessment) on reading processes and products. We found a positive effect of self-explanation instructions on the quantity and quality of cognitive processes during reading, and an interaction between self-explanation and purpose instructions on comprehension and transfer. Regression analyses furtherly indicated the quantity and quality of cognitive process predicted reading outcomes.

ABSTRACT. Student comprehension of expository science text is dependent on many factors including prior knowledge or misconceptions. Further, the composition of a text can has a large effect on how well students understand it. The present study explored the independent effects of refutations and summaries on comprehension of an introductory psychology text. No differences were found in comprehension between refutation and non-refutation versions, but adding a final summary paragraph improved learning from both versions.

ABSTRACT. This study examined the interaction between emotions and beliefs on the comprehension of multiple texts about climate change. Following a video induction, participants who held neutral beliefs about climate change that were induced to feel sad emotions performed better than happy-induced participants on questions assessing within-text inference verification. Beliefs removed the effects of emotions in the other conditions. Therefore, beliefs, in some cases, may override the effects of emotion with relation to climate change.

ABSTRACT. The current study investigates how conceptual knowledge supports comprehension and learning (i.e., a familiarity effect) and protects against accepting false information (i.e., false information effect) both during learning and during later memory retrieval. We combine behavioral measures that provide information on whether the (in)accurate information is consolidated in memory with event-related potentials (ERPs) that provide complementary information on how knowledge affects readers’ moment-by-moment processing of texts containing false information during learning.

ABSTRACT. Corrections to readers’ misconceptions should elicit higher belief from high-credibility information sources; however, we do not yet fully understand how changes to source credibility influence knowledge revision. Thus, we examined how updating a source character’s credibility influenced knowledge revision and source evaluations after readers engaged with refutation and non-refutation texts. Results showed that readers updated credibility evaluations and revised knowledge when refutations came from sources updated to be high-credibility, indicating that source judgements are malleable.

ABSTRACT. Exposure to false information can result in reliance on incorrect ideas. Previous work has shown that evaluative tasks beneficially increase reliance on correct prior knowledge over presented inaccuracies. In two experiments, we demonstrate that confronting people with feedback about their potential susceptibility to inaccuracies, and that they are being monitored with respect to their performance, can encourage evaluation during comprehension. This beneficially reduces the extent to which people are influenced by inaccuracies they read.