FROM COVERT PROCESSES TO OVERT OUTCOMES OF REFUTATION TEXT READING: THE INTERPLAY OF SCIENCE TEXT STRUCTURE AND WORKING MEMORY CAPACITY THROUGH EYE FIXATIONS

This study extends current research on the refutation text effect by investigating it in learners with different levels of working memory capacity. The purpose is to outline the link between online processes (revealed by eye fixation indices) and off-line outcomes in these learners. In science education, unlike a standard text, a refutation text acknowledges readers’ alternative conceptions about a topic, refutes them, and presents scientific conceptions as viable alternatives. Lower and higher memory span university students with alternative conceptions about the topic read either a refutation or a non-refutation text about tides. Off-line measures of learning revealed that both groups of refutation text readers attained higher knowledge gains. During the reading process, refutation text readers fixated for longer on the refutation segments while reading the parts presenting the scientific information (look-froms). Non-refutation text readers looked back to the informational parts for longer. Look-froms (positively) and reading time (negatively) predicted learning from refutation text, indicating that the quality, not quantity, of reading was related to it. In contrast, learning from non-refutation text was predicted only by working memory capacity. The refutation effect is discussed and educational implications are drawn.     

Conceptual change with refutational maps

ABSTRACT

This study investigated how studying a refutational map, a type of argument map, affected conceptual change. Refutational maps visually display both correct and alternative conceptions. Participants (N?=?120) were randomly assigned to (1) a refutational map condition, (2) a refutational text condition, and (3) a non-refutational text condition. The post-test results showed that studying the refutational map led to better performance on free recall and learning transfer measures. Specifically, participants who studied the refutational map performed significantly better than others on a free recall test, and they significantly outperformed the non-refutational text group on a short-answer transfer test. The multiple-choice test, another transfer measure, failed to detect any differences among the three groups. The research also found that individual differences in need for cognition and logical thinking ability interacted with the type of study materials. Participants scoring lower on logical thinking ability gained more from studying the refutational map.     

Promoting the Understanding of Photosynthesis Among Elementary School Student Teachers Through Text Design

The purpose of this study was to investigate elementary school pre-service teachers’ understanding of photosynthesis and to examine if a refutational text can support understanding of photosynthesis better than a non-refutational text. A total of 91 elementary school pre-service teachers read either a refutational or a non-refutational text concerning photosynthesis and then answered open-ended questions. Our results indicate that there are critical problems associated with student teachers learning about the process of photosynthesis, even after it has been systematically taught in teacher education. However, the results positively indicate that refutational science texts seem to foster effective conceptual change among student teachers. The results interestingly showed that students who read a refutational text improved their systemic and factual understanding of photosynthesis more than did those who read a non-refutational text. Especially students who had naïve prior understanding regarding photosynthesis benefitted more from a refutational text. Thus, a refutational text may act as an effective facilitator of conceptual change. These results have implications for teacher education, where conceptual mastery of the most important science phenomena, such as photosynthesis, should be achieved. A refutational text is an easy and effective way to support conceptual change in higher education. Thus, this study highlights the importance of domain-specific science education in teacher programmes.     

Influence of text structure on learning counterintuitive physics concepts

The purpose of this study was to explore the influences of text structure on students' conceptual change. Case studies were conducted of three sections of physics (Physical World, Physics, and Honors Physics) for 8 months of an academic year. Qualitative data (including observation field notes, interviews, videotapes, audiotapes, and questionnaires) were analyzed from the perspective of grounded theory by constant comparison through the framework of social constructivism. Results showed that individuals used refutational text to change their alternative conceptions, find support for their scientific preconceptions, gain the language necessary to discuss their ideas, and acquire new concepts. We also found instances, however, when students ignored the text and persisted with their alternative conception, or when students found support for their nonscientific ideas from refutational text. In these cases, we found that either the refutation was not direct enough to be effective, or students' reading strategies were insufficient to facilitate conceptual change. In investigating the power of refutational text, we found that refutational text does cause cognitive conflict. We also discovered that while cognitive conflict may be necessary for conceptual change to occur, it is not sufficient. Although refutational text is effective on the average for groups of students, it will need to be supplemented by discussion for individuals. J Res Sci Teach 34: 701–719, 1997.     

Enhancing Pre-service Elementary Teachers' Conceptual Understanding of Solution Chemistry with Conceptual Change Text

This paper reports on the use of a constructivist-based pedagogy to enhance understanding of some features of solution chemistry. Pre-service science teacher trainees' prior knowledge about the dissolution of salts and sugar in water were elicited by the use of a simple diagnostic tool. The test revealed widespread alternative conceptions. These evaluation data were used to produce two segments of ‘conceptual change text’: concise summaries that present alternative and scientific conceptualizations for the concepts under study. The texts were administered to 21 pre-service elementary trainee teachers whose understandings of number of conceptions were subsequently re-evaluated employing a pre-test post-test approach in which their answers and reasons for their answers were solicited. The findings suggest that these pre-service elementary trainees' alternative conceptions are changed to become more in accord with the scientific view, with more participants providing correct answers along with correct reasons than before the intervention. This work suggests that the use of conceptual change text may provide a simple and cost and resource-effective way to aid conceptual understanding for the dissolution of ionic solids in water including the effect of solute surface on the dissolution process.     

How word decoding skill impacts text memory: The centrality deficit and how domain knowledge can compensate

We examined text memory in children with word reading deficits to determine how these difficulties impact representations of text meaning. We show that even though children with poor word decoding recall more central than peripheral information, they show a significantly bigger deficit relative to controls on central than on peripheral information. We call this the centrality deficit and argue that it is the consequence of insufficient cognitive resources for connecting ideas together due to these children’s resources being diverted from comprehension to word decoding. We investigated a possible compensatory mechanism for making these connections. Because a text representation is a synthesis of text information and a reader’s prior knowledge, we hypothesized that having knowledge of the passage topic might reduce or eliminate the centrality deficit. Our results support this knowledge compensation hypothesis: The centrality deficit was evident when poor readers did not have prior knowledge, but was eliminated when they did. This presents an exciting avenue to pursue for possible remediation of reading comprehension in children with word identification difficulties.     

Cognitive and linguistic predictors of text comprehension

The problem was concerned with the extent to which cognitive/linguistic functions and domain-specific strategies could predict readers’ text comprehension when working with science texts. Six hypotheses were stated and tested in two prediction studies (N=101 eighth-graders), and one experiment (N=8 pupils of same age). Handal’s reading test was used for classifying pupils into good and poor readers. Two texts, one with a known subject and another with an unknown theme were imposed pupils as science reading tasks. Questionnaires and tests concerning cognitive and linguistic functions were used as independent variables in the prediction studies. Two different tests were used as independent variables (for text comprehension) in all of the three studies, and one additional criterion test (writing essays on main ideas in the texts) was applied in the experient. The experiment was organized as a 2x2 factorial design where text type and reading skill were the factors. According to the results, 5 of the 6 hypotheses could not be rejected, i.e., general concept information was the most significant predictor of science text comprehension. Furthermore, text based on a subject known to the reader always surpassed text with an unknown subject as to text comprehension. Similarily, across-domain strategies were more closely related to reading comprehension than domain-specific strategies.     

Impact of text availability and question format on reading comprehension processes

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.     

The role of instructional variables in conceptual change in high school physics topics

This study was conducted to determine the effect of three variables on conceptual change in physics. Ninth and 10th-grade students who, despite instruction, still held nonscientific intuitive ideas about the motion of objects participated in viewing a demonstration, engaged in student-to-student discussion, and/or read a refutational text about Newton's laws of motion. Students (N = 310) were randomly assigned within classes to eight groups representing combinations of the three activities and participated in pretesting, instruction, and posttesting. Posttest results revealed that reading the refutational text helped students change their intuitive ideas to scientific ones, while seeing a demonstration affected how students interacted with group and text on some measures. Discussing ideas in a group did not lead to significant learning of scientific notions but, rather, caused students to be less influenced by either the demonstration or the text.     

Eye-movement modeling of integrative reading of an illustrated text: Effects on processing and learning

Integrative processing of verbal and graphical information is crucial when students read an illustrated text to learn from it. This study examines the potential of a novel approach to support the processing of text and graphics. We used eye movement modeling example (EMME) in the school context to model students' integrative processes of verbal and pictorial information by replaying a model's gazes while reading an illustrated text on a topic different from that of the learning episode. Forty-two 7th graders were randomly assigned to an experimental (EMME) or a control condition (No-EMME) and were asked to read an illustrated science text about the food chain. Online measures of text processing and offline measures of reading outcomes were used. Eye-movement indices indicated that students in the EMME condition showed more integrative processing than students in the No-EMME condition. They also performed better than the latter in the verbal and graphical recall, and in the transfer task. Finally, the relationship between the duration of reprocessing the graphical segments while rereading the correspondent verbal segments and transfer performance was stronger in the EMME condition, after controlling for the individual differences of prior knowledge, reading comprehension, and achievement in science. Overall, the findings suggest the potential of eye-tracking methodology as an instruction tool.     

Comprehending coherent and incoherent texts: evidence from eye movement patterns and recall performance

The effect of text structure on the reading process and recall performance was examined. Adult readers’ eye movements were monitored when they read coherently and incoherently structured texts (N=19). Incoherence was brought about by changing the sentence order in the middle paragraphs of the two stimulus texts. Each subject read and learned one text in a coherent and the other in an incoherent form in two experimental sessions. Immediate free recall followed the reading. The eye movement data showed that during the first pass reading, i.e. initial reading of a sentence until the end of the sentence is reached, structurally incoherent text segments attracted the largest number of regressive fixations, and, hence, were given more visual attention than coherent text segments (indicated by the total duration of fixations). On the other hand, more rereadings, i.e. all fixations made after the first pass reading but before moving away from the given sentence, were devoted to text segments resolving the incoherence. Textual incoherence was further found to lead to inferior recall. However, no clear-cut correspondence between eye movement behavior and quantitative recall performance was found.     

The Role of Regulation and Processing Strategies in Understanding Science Text Among University Students

The aim of the study was to investigate the role of regulation and processing strategies in understanding science text. A total of 91 student teachers answered open-ended questions concerning photosynthesis before and after reading either a traditional or a refutational science text. After this, they also answered parts of the Inventory of Learning Styles. Understanding of photosynthesis increased after the text reading among all the students. However, deep and independent learners reached a better understanding than reproductive and support-dependent students. The refutational text seemed to promote understanding more than the traditional text. The study supports the assumption that personal characteristics play a role in learning complex scientific concepts. Further, refutational texts seem to facilitate high quality learning.     

Reversing letters and reading transformed text in dyslexia: A reassessment

The visual deficit hypothesis of development dyslexia has largely been abandoned because many of the phenomena that initially motivated it could not be replicated under controlled experimental conditions, while phonological processing deficits were found to provide a better explanation for the replicable phenomena. Nevertheless, many teachers and special educators continue to subscribe to the hypothesis that deficits of visual perception are a major cause of reading failure in dyslexia. As part of a larger family study, we reexamined the questions (1) whether probands and affected relatives in dyslexia families reverse easily confused letters more frequently under experimental conditions than normal readers from the same families, and (2) whether they show unusual facility in reading geometrically transformed text. The findings indicated that young dyslexia students reverse easily confused letters more often than normal readers. Reading group differences of letter reversal were significant in children from 7–10 years but not thereafter; and virtually no subject reversed letters when spelling whole words. Furthermore, dyslexic persons in every age group from 7–60 years actually took longer than normal readers to decode geometrically transformed text; and the time to decode transformed texts increased progressively with age after adolescence in both dyslexic persons and normal readers. Thus, reading group differences in decoding easily confused letters and reading geometrically transformed text do not support the visual deficit hypothesis and probably do not help to clarify the etiology of developmental dyslexia.     

Eye-movement patterns and reader characteristics of students with good and poor performance when reading scientific text with diagrams

This study investigated the cognitive processes and reader characteristics of sixth graders who had good and poor performance when reading scientific text with diagrams. We first measured the reading ability and reading self-efficacy of sixth-grade participants, and then recorded their eye movements while they were reading an illustrated scientific text and scored their answers to content-related questions. Finally, the participants evaluated the difficulty of the article, the attractiveness of the content and diagram, and their learning performance. The participants were then classified into groups based on how many correct responses they gave to questions related to reading. The results showed that readers with good performance had better character recognition ability and reading self-efficacy, were more attracted to the diagrams, and had higher self-evaluated learning levels than the readers with poor performance did. Eye-movement data indicated that readers with good performance spent significantly more reading time on the whole article, the text section, and the diagram section than the readers with poor performance did. Interestingly, readers with good performance had significantly longer mean fixation duration on the diagrams than readers with poor performance did; further, readers with good performance made more saccades between the text and the diagrams. Additionally, sequential analysis of eye movements showed that readers with good performance preferred to observe the diagram rather than the text after reading the title, but this tendency was not present in readers with poor performance. In sum, using eye-tracking technology and several reading tests and questionnaires, we found that various cognitive aspects (reading strategy, diagram utilization) and affective aspects (reading self-efficacy, article likeness, diagram attraction, and self-evaluation of learning) affected sixth graders’ reading performance in this study.     

The interaction with text of failing and normal readers (Ph.D thesis,School of Education,Open University, 1984)

The research reported in this thesis was designed to investigate the nature of reading comprehension failure with a view to improving remedial reading programmes for those children who, although resembling normal readers in other respects, enter secondary education with an inadequate level of reading ability. By the use of cloze tests, in which the reader is required to restore words deleted from a text, comparisons were made between failing readers at age twelve, normal readers of age twelve and normal readers of age nine who had reached the same level of reading comprehension as the failing twelve-year-olds. The three groups’ responses were classified by a system based on a view of the reading process as an interaction between the reader and the text. The effects of specific aspects of text on the three groups of readers were investigated. It was found that there were significant differences between the responses offered by the failing readers at age twelve and normal readers at age nine. Since the level of reading ability of the two groups was the same, this suggests that reading failure involves qualitative differences from normal reading development. The types of difficulty experienced by failing readers, as reflected in their cloze responses, include difficulties in visual scanning, in reconstruction of syntactic structures and in vocabulary. These components did not affect all failing readers equally. Failing readers appear to have greater difficulty than normal in relating their responses to the general theme of the text and tend to treat it as a series of isolated fragments. They make less use of the context following a deleted word than normal readers. Failing readers at age twelve appear to have greater difficulty than normal readers at age nine in recognizing which segments of a text contain important information. The whole population of a secondary school, 643 subjects, was tested and it was found that failing readers at age fifteen produced the same pattern of responses as those failing at age twelve. The only improvement appearing in their reading was in the processing of complete sentences. There were indications that remedial programmes designed on the diagnostic basis provided by the research results produced an increase in reading age in six months of a similar order to that produced by previous remedial programmes in a year. The increase was approximately twenty-four months on average for a group of failing readers whose mean reading age on entry was eight years six months. The programme caused them to alter their response patterns to resemble those of normal readers at age twelve.     

The effect of format on performance: Editing text in print versus digital formats

In light of the present‐day proliferation of digital texts and the increase in situations that require active digital text reading in learning, it is becoming increasingly important to shed light on the comparison between print and digital reading under active reading conditions. In this study, the active reading abilities of 93 university students (83% females) were examined. Participants were asked to read, edit, recognize errors and improve the quality of short papers (600 words each) on the topic of environmental awareness, in both print and in digital formats. Surprisingly, and in contrast to many recent reports about print versus digital reading, no significant differences were found between the performances of participants in the two formats. Similarly, no significant differences were found for all categories of text errors as well as for gender. It was found that the digital readers completed their tasks faster than the print readers but their performance was not lower. Results of this study have important implications for the current debate in higher education concerning the use of digital text for learning and for designing, reviewing and editing academic works.     

Development of text reading in Japanese: an eye movement study

This study examined age-group differences in eye movements among third-grade, fifth-grade, and adult Japanese readers. In Experiment 1, Japanese children, but not adults, showed a longer fixation time on logographic kanji words than on phonologically transparent hiragana words. Further, an age-group difference was found in the first fixation duration on hiragana words but not on kanji words, suggesting character-type-dependent reading development in Japanese children. Examination of the distributions of saccade landing positions revealed that, like adults, both third and fifth graders fixated more on kanji than on hiragana characters, which suggests that even young children utilize the same oculomotor control strategy (the kanji targeting strategy) as Japanese adults. In Experiment 2, we examined whether the proportion of kanji characters in a text affected adult reading performance. Japanese adults made more refixations and regressions in texts with a high proportion of hiragana characters. The results of both experiments suggest that differences between kanji and kana affect the reading efficiency of school-age children and that maturation of reading skills allows adults to optimize their strategy in reading kanji and kana mixed texts.     

The Talking Drawings Strategy: Using Primary Children’s Illustrations and Oral Language to Improve Comprehension of Expository Text

Listening and reading comprehension can be assessed by analyzing children’s visual, verbal, and written representations of their understandings. “Talking Drawings” (McConnell, S. (1993). Talking drawings: A strategy for assisting learners. Journal of Reading, 36(4), 260–269 is one strategy that enables children to combine their prior knowledge with the new information derived from an expository text and “translate” those newly-acquired understandings into other symbol systems, including an oral discussion with a partner, a more detailed drawing, and written labels for the drawing. The Talking Drawings strategy begins by inviting children to create pre-learning drawings. These initial drawings are a way of taking inventory of a child’s current content knowledge about a particular topic. After pre-learning drawings are created and shared, children listen to or read an expository text (e.g., information book, passage from a textbook) on the same topic as their drawing. Pairs of students discuss the information and either modify their pre-learning drawings to be more detailed or create completely new drawings that reflect the recently-acquired information. Students are encouraged to label their drawings with words in a diagram or schematic fashion. By evaluating the “before” and “after” artwork, educators can identify advances in students’ reading and listening comprehension of the terminology, facts, and principles on a particular topic.     

Learning from expository texts: Effects of the interaction of prior knowledge and text structure on responses to different question types

The objective of this study was to verify the effects of the interaction between text structures and prior knowledge on memory and learning from expository texts. It examined the effects of two levels of prior knowledge and two types of mixed structures on a post-reading questionnaire. A total of 119 French-speaking, sixth-grade subjects were selected on the basis of a multiple-choice questionnaire. This questionnaire served to distinguish two groups, one possessing a high level of prior knowledge about the topic covered in the text (HP group), and another having a low level of prior knowledge (LP group). The children’s reading ability was evaluated by a cloze test that also served to eliminate children with reading comprehension difficulties from the experimental groups. The subjects in each group were arbitrarily assigned to subgroups. One group read an experimental passage, “The effects of acid rain on maple and pine”, which was organized in a collection inserted in cause/effect structure (SI). The other group read the same information, but which was organized in a comparison inserted in cause/effect structure (S2). The post-reading measure consisted of 24 questions that varied according to three criteria. The statistical analysis revealed that the effects of text structure were dependent on the level of prior knowledge and on the type of questions and confirmed that prior knowledge had a determining influence on knowledge acquisition.     

How the relationship between text and headings influences readers’ memory

Two questions regarding signals’ influence on memory were examined. First, the relationship between headings and text was manipulated to determine whether headings serve as visual cues, directing readers to recall all subsequent information, or content-specific cues, directing readers to recall only to certain information. Second, distance between headings and signaled information was manipulated to determine the extent to which headings focus readers’ recall. College students read a multiple-topic expository text. Free recall for main topics was facilitated by being related to headings and being close to headings and inhibited by being unrelated to headings and distant from headings. Conditional recall (recall of subordinate information pertaining to a main topic) was not affected by either relatedness of heading or distance. Results are consistent with research showing signals’ mixed influence on recall and suggest relation and distance as factors to consider when writing and reading exposition.