Reading and writing to learn in secondary education: online processing activity and written products in summarizing and synthesizing tasks

The research reported here employed a multiple-case study methodology to assess the online cognitive and metacognitive activities of 15-year-old secondary students as they read informational texts and wrote a new text in order to learn, and the relation of these activities to the written products they were asked to generate. To investigate the influence of the task, students were required to perform two different tasks which differed in complexity and familiarity. The first task was reading a single text and making a written summary of it, while the second consisted in reading two texts and making a written synthesis of them. To gather information about how students construct meaning from informational texts, we asked students to think aloud as they read and wrote in order to provide us with information about their comprehension and composition processes. We also examined their reading and writing activities during the tasks. The results show that to a large extent secondary school students lack the cognitive and metacognitive processes that would enable them to make strategic use of reading and writing. They also show that, although there are no major differences in the way secondary school students tackle these different tasks, those who create the most elaborate products evidence a more recursive and flexible use of reading and writing. The most obvious conclusion as far as the repercussions of these findings are concerned is that there is an urgent need for work on tasks of this kind in the classroom.     

Epistemic Beliefs and Their Relation to Multiple-Text Comprehension: A Norwegian Program of Research

Nowadays, students are required to use multiple information sources to complete tasks, both in and out of school. The beliefs that students hold about knowledge and knowing – their epistemic beliefs – have been linked to successful integration of information across multiple texts. Framed by literature on epistemic belief research from an educational psychology perspective, this article reviews a recent Norwegian program of research on students' epistemic beliefs. The research has implications for educational research and practice that are discussed.     

Academic language and the quality of written arguments and explanations of Chilean 8th graders

Writing is a task that entails high cognitive and linguistic efforts, especially when producing academic texts. Academic language might be one of the factors influencing the quality of written texts, given that prior research has shown its impact on reading comprehension. The purpose of this study is to examine the contribution of Spanish Core Academic Language Skills (S-CALS) and academic vocabulary to the quality of written argumentation and explanation. For this study, 126 Chilean 8th grade students produced an argumentative text and an explanatory text about the same topic. In addition, their academic vocabulary was assessed with the S-AVoc-T test and their CALS with the S-CALS-I test. Results show that both CALS and academic vocabulary are significantly and positively correlated with both writing tasks. Even though these instruments make different contributions to the predictive models in each discursive genre, a Principal Component Analysis revealed that the model that best explains writing quality are those which combine both language variables, namely Spanish Core Academic Language and Vocabulary Skills (S-CALVS). In argumentation, the S-CALVS model explains 29% of the variance, after controlling by gender. In contrast, in explanation, S-CALVS explains 35% of the variance. It is concluded that it is relevant to develop situated writing in each discursive genre and, upon that basis, to work with both CALS and academic vocabulary, because they have a specific impact on academic texts writing.     

大学生精神信仰的特点及其与生活满意度的关系

采用大学生精神信仰问卷和青少年学生生活满意度量表对400名大学生进行测查,以考察大学生精神信仰的发展特点及其与生活满意度的关系。结果表明：（1）大学生精神信仰的总体状况呈现出超自然信仰最强、实用信仰次之、社会信仰最弱的特点,不同性别的大学生在精神信仰的一些因子中存在显著的差异。（2）精神信仰与生活满意度存在一定的预测关系,精神信仰各个维度对不同领域生活满意度的影响程度各不相同,不同整体生活满意度的学生在神灵崇拜、政治信仰、民族主义、国家主义、金钱崇拜、社会信仰六个因子上均存在显著差异。     

Facilitating fourth-grade students’ written argumentation: The use of an argumentation graphic organizer

Abstract

Literacy instruction in the 21st century must bolster students’ ability to critically process text and craft well-reasoned written argumentation. The authors investigated changes in fourth-grade students’ (N?=?28; 15 girls) written argumentation as they used a researcher-developed graphic organizer (i.e., Quality Talk graphic organizer [QT_GO]). The authors also examined the extent to which students’ graphic organizer performance predicted their written argumentation and whether such prediction was sustained across genres. Both QT_GO responses and written argumentation essays were scored for quantity and quality. Multilevel modeling analyses reveal that (a) both quantity and quality of students’ written argumentation essays statistically significantly improved after students used QT_GO and (b) students’ graphic organizer performance seemed to attenuate the effect of genre on their written argumentation for both quantity and quality. Results suggest that QT_GO facilitated students’ written argumentation, making it easier for fourth-grade students to write about both narrative and expository texts.     

Exploring the relations between epistemic beliefs,emotions, and learning from texts

Conflicting claims about important socio-scientific debates are proliferating in contemporary society. It is therefore important to understand the individual characteristics that predict learning from conflicting claims. We explored individuals’ beliefs about the nature of knowledge and knowing (i.e., epistemic beliefs) and their emotions as potentially interrelated sets of learner characteristics that predict learning in such contexts. Undergraduate university students (N = 282) self-reported their topic-specific epistemic beliefs and were given three conflicting texts about climate change to read. Immediately after each of the three texts, participants self-reported the emotions they experienced. Following reading and self-report, participants wrote summaries of the conflicting texts. Text-mining and human coding were applied to summaries to construct two indices of learning from conflicting texts that reflected which source’s information is privileged in memory. Results from structural equation modeling revealed that epistemic beliefs were consistent in their predictions of emotions, which in turn variously predicted different learning outcomes. In particular, a belief that knowledge is justified by inquiry predicted surprise and curiosity, which at times facilitated learning. In contrast, confusion, predicted by passive reliance on external sources, related to impaired memory of conflicting content. Theoretical and methodological implications are discussed for research on the relations between epistemic beliefs, emotions, and learning about controversial topics.     

Prediction of learning and comprehension when adolescents read multiple texts: the roles of word-level processing, strategic approach, and reading motivation

Sixty-five Norwegian 10th graders used the software Read&Answer 2.0 (Vidal-Abarca et al., 2011) to read five different texts presenting conflicting views on the controversial scientific issue of sun exposure and health. Participants were administered a multiple-choice topic-knowledge measure before and after reading, a word recognition task, and a reading motivation inventory that included two dimensions: Science reading self-efficacy, focusing on readers’ beliefs about their capabilities to comprehend what they read in science, and science reading task value, focusing on readers’ beliefs about how important, useful, and interesting it is to comprehend science texts. In addition, strategic reading pattern was assessed in terms of the degree of non-linear reading behavior. Multiple regression analysis showed that word recognition skills strongly predicted learning from the texts, as assessed by participants’ increase in topic knowledge. However, when multiple-text comprehension indicated by performance on open-ended short-essay questions was the dependent variable, not only word recognition but also strategic reading pattern and science reading self-efficacy emerged as unique predictors when topic knowledge was controlled for. Science reading task value was not related to performance. This study provides new evidence that new literacy competencies needed in a knowledge society, such as synthesizing or integrating across multiple conflicting sources of information, still largely involve word-level, strategic, and motivational processes that may profitably be targeted through systematic instruction.     

Interest in an expository text: How does it flow from reading to writing?

This study investigated the flow of interest in a reading-to-write activity. It was hypothesized that (a) different contents in a text would stimulate different types of interest and (b) different writing tasks would impact differently students’ use of interesting text segments. Participants were 247 11th- and 12th-grade students, who were divided into 6 groups according to a 2 (interesting vs. uninteresting topic) × 3 (type of writing task) design. While reading, students rated novelty, curiosity, impressiveness, importance, and willingness to reflect on each text segment. Participants were then assigned to one of three writing tasks, namely argumentation, text designing, and composition. Results showed that concepts were regarded as important, events/activities as impressive, and evaluations as most worthy of reflection. Topic interest was explicitly expressed mainly in the argumentation condition, where increased topic interest scores after reading and writing were also found.     

Staying with the text: the contribution of gender,achievement orientations,and interest to students’ performance on a literacy task

This study addresses concerns about boys’ underperformance on literacy tasks compared to girls, by investigating male and females students’ responses to narrative texts. Participants were 142 Grade 9 and 10 students. Achievement orientations, including goals, self‐efficacy, and self‐handicapping, were measured and approach and avoidance factors identified. Boys scored higher than girls on the avoidance factor. The task presented to participants involved reading sections from two narrative texts representing typically male or typically female reading interests. Interest ratings for the narrative text topics and interest levels while reading the texts were monitored, and students’ answers to multiple‐choice questions on text content recorded. Regression analyses confirmed that the influence of gender, achievement orientation, and on‐task text interest on reading performance varied with different patterns of task interest. The findings suggest that students’ achievement orientations and task interests are both important for understanding gender differences in students’ response to narrative texts.     

Disciplinary Literacies and Learning to Read for Understanding: A Conceptual Framework for Disciplinary Literacy

This article presents a framework and methodology for designing learning goals targeted at what students need to know and be able to do in order to attain high levels of literacy and achievement in three disciplinary areas—literature, science, and history. For each discipline, a team of researchers, teachers, and specialists in that discipline engaged in conceptual meta-analysis of theory and research on the reading, reasoning, and inquiry practices exhibited by disciplinary experts as contrasted with novices. Each team identified discipline-specific clusters of types of knowledge. Across teams, the clusters for each discipline were grouped into 5 higher order categories of core constructs: (a) epistemology; (b) inquiry practices/strategies of reasoning; (c) overarching concepts, themes, and frameworks; (d) forms of information representation/types of texts; and (e) discourse and language structures. The substance of the clusters gave rise to discipline-specific goals and tasks involved in reading across multiple texts, as well as reading, reasoning, and argumentation practices tailored to discipline-specific criteria for evidence-based knowledge claims. The framework of constructs and processes provides a valuable tool for researchers and classroom teachers' (re)conceptualizations of literacy and argumentation learning goals in their specific disciplines.     

Exploring learners’ beliefs about science reading and scientific epistemic beliefs,and their relations with science text understanding

The main purpose of this study was to explore learners' beliefs about science reading and scientific epistemic beliefs, and how these beliefs were associating with their understanding of science texts. About 400 10th graders were involved in the development and validation of the Beliefs about Science Reading Inventory (BSRI). To find the effects of reader beliefs and epistemic beliefs, a new group of 65 10th grade students whose reader and epistemic beliefs were assessed by the newly developed BSRI and an existing SEB questionnaire were invited to take part in a science reading task. Students' text understanding in terms of concept gain and text interpretations was collected and analyzed. By the correlation analysis, it was found that when students had stronger beliefs about meaning construction based on personal goals and experiences (i.e. transaction beliefs), they produced more thematic and critical interpretations of the content of the test article. The regression analysis suggested that students SEBs could predict concept gain as a result of reading. Moreover, among all beliefs examined in the study, transaction beliefs stood out as the best predictor of overall science-text understanding.     

Secondary science teachers' attitudes toward and beliefs about science reading and science textbooks

Science textbooks are dominant influences behind most secondary science instruction but little is known about teachers' approach to science reading. The purpose of this naturalistic study was to develop and validate a Science and Reading Questionnaire to assess secondary science teachers' attitudes toward science reading and their beliefs or informed opinions about science reading. A survey of 428 British Columbia secondary science teachers was conducted and 215 science teachers responded. Results on a 12-item Likert attitude scale indicated that teachers place high value on reading as an important strategy to promote learning in science and that they generally accept responsibility for teaching content reading skills to science students. Results on a 13-item Likert belief scale indicated that science teachers generally reject the text-driven model of reading, but they usually do not have well-formulated alternative models to guide their teaching practices. Teachers have intuitive beliefs about science reading that partially agree with many research findings, but their beliefs are fragmented and particularly sketchy in regard to the cognitive and metacognitive skills required by readers to learn from science texts. The findings for attitude, belief, and total scales were substantiated by further questions in the Science and Reading Questionnaire regarding classroom practice and by individual interviews and classroom observations of a 15-teacher subsample of the questionnaire respondents.     

Are poor Chinese text comprehenders also poor in written composition?

We studied the performance in three genres of Chinese written composition (narration, exposition, and argumentation) of 158 grade 4, 5, and 6 poor Chinese text comprehenders compared with 156 good Chinese text comprehenders. We examined text comprehension and written composition relationship. Verbal working memory (verbal span working memory and operation span working memory) and different levels of linguistic tasks—morphological sensitivity (morphological compounding and morphological chain), sentence processing (syntax construction and syntax integrity), and text comprehension (narrative and expository texts)—were used to predict separately narrative, expository, and argumentation written compositions in these students. Grade for grade, the good text comprehenders outperformed the poor text comprehenders in all tasks, except for morphological chain. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed differential contribution of the tasks to different genres of writing. In particular, text comprehension made unique contribution to argumentation writing in the poor text comprehenders. Future studies should ask students to read and write parallel passages in the same genre for better comparison and incorporate both instructional and motivational variables.     

Learning from refutation texts about scientific topics with analogical and causal explanations

Previous research has suggested that refutation texts are effective in facilitating learning and revision of misconceptions and that explanations are an essential component in their efficacy. In this study, we investigated the extent to which reading refutation texts featuring an analogy as an explanatory tool rather than a causal explanation results in different encoding processes during reading, belief in misconceptions, and confidence in beliefs. Using a think-aloud methodology, we found that a higher proportion of text-based inferences was associated with analogy texts than with non-analogy texts, and a higher proportion of knowledge-based inferences was associated with non-analogy than with analogy texts. Contrary to our hypotheses, no significant differences were found in belief in misconceptions and confidence outcomes between the text conditions. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of previous research suggesting that analogies improve learning outcomes.     

Investigating effects of reading medium and reading purpose on behavioral engagement and textual integration in a multiple text context

The study addressed to what extent behavioral engagement and textual integration may differ when undergraduate readers work with identical printed versus digital texts in preparation for an exam versus for pleasure. We expected that working with printed texts would lead to greater engagement and better integration than working with digital texts, but that reading purpose would moderate this effect of reading medium because those reading in preparation for an exam would display greater engagement and better integration regardless of reading medium. Results showed interaction effects of reading medium with reading purpose on the behavioral engagement indicators of reading time and the length of the post-reading written products. For reading time, the interaction involved that students used longer time when reading digital and mixed texts for an exam, compared to reading for pleasure, whereas there were no difference between exam and pleasure oriented reading when reading printed texts. For the length of the written responses, students produced more text when reading printed texts for an exam than when reading printed texts for pleasure, whereas there were no differences in text production between reading for an exam and reading for pleasure when reading digital or mixed texts. Finally, there was an indirect effect of reading purpose on textual integration via text production when students read printed texts: students who read printed texts in preparation for an exam produced longer written responses compared to those who read for pleasure and, in turn, gained a more integrated understanding of the issue in question. These results are discussed in terms of the implications they offer and the avenues they suggest for future research.     

Approach to mathematical problem solving and students’ belief systems: two case studies

The goal of the study reported here is to gain a better understanding of the role of belief systems in the approach phase to mathematical problem solving. Two students of high academic performance were selected based on a previous exploratory study of 61 students 12–13 years old. In this study we identified different types of approaches to problems that determine the behavior of students in the problem-solving process. The research found two aspects that explain the students’ approaches to problem solving: (1) the presence of a dualistic belief system originating in the student’s school experience; and (2) motivation linked to beliefs regarding the difficulty of the task. Our results indicate that there is a complex relationship between students’ belief systems and approaches to problem solving, if we consider a wide variety of beliefs about the nature of mathematics and problem solving and motivational beliefs, but that it is not possible to establish relationships of causality between specific beliefs and problem-solving activity (or vice versa).     

Effects of text-belief consistency and reading task on the strategic validation of multiple texts

In the comprehension of multiple controversial scientific texts, readers with strong prior beliefs tend to construct a one-sided mental representation that is biased towards belief-consistent information. In the present study, we examined whether an argument in contrast to a summary task instruction can increase the resource allocation to and strategic validation of belief-inconsistent information which should be positively related to comprehension. Undergraduate students read one belief-consistent and one belief-inconsistent text about a controversial scientific issue either with an argument or a summary task instruction. The use of strategic validation and memorization strategies was assessed with think-aloud protocols, and a verification task was used to investigate comprehension outcomes. As predicted, readers following a summary task read belief-consistent information longer and used more memorization strategies for such information. Readers following an argument task spent similar time reading both text types and used more validation strategies when reading the belief-inconsistent text. In addition, the use of strategic validation during reading the belief-inconsistent text improved comprehension for this text type but hindered the comprehension of the belief-consistent text.     

Motivation and studying in high school science

Three groups of high school science students (college-bound and non-college-bound freshmen, college-bound juniors and seniors) completed surveys measuring their beliefs in the utility of four kinds of study strategies, three types of motivational orientation to science (task orientation, ego orientation, and work avoidance), their reported ability, and attitude toward science. Results indicated that belief in the usefulness of strategies requiring deep processing of information was more strongly positively related to task orientation than to ego orientation in all groups. For the younger groups only, task orientation was positively related to belief in the utility of surface-level strategies (e.g., rote memorization of facts). Task orientation proved to be the best predictor of student beliefs in deep-processing strategies, above and beyond that explained by perceived ability and interest in science. The implications of these findings for the current and future goals of science educators are discussed.     

大学生精神信仰的发展特点——以泉州师范学院为例

采用大学生精神信仰问卷对泉州师范学院210名大学生进行调查。研究显示：大学生的一级信仰之间存在显著的差异,由高到低依次为社会信仰、实用信仰及超自然信仰。说明当代大学生对社会信仰更认同。而超自然信仰并没有想象中的那么严重。大学生对民族主义、生命崇拜、政治信仰以及国家主义等次级信仰的认同程度较高．而对宗教信仰、神灵信仰以及金钱崇拜等次级信仰的认同程度较低。相对而言,男生更容易产生金钱崇拜,女生更容易产生生命崇拜;学生干部比非学生干部更容易产生家族崇拜;大四比其他年级的学生更容易产生实用信仰：来自城镇的大学生更容易产生神灵崇拜,而来自农村的大学生更容易产生家庭主义。     

Image–language interaction in online reading environments: challenges for students’ reading comprehension

This paper presents the qualitative results of a study of students’ reading of multimodal texts in an interactive, online environment. The study forms part of a larger project which addressed image–language interaction as an important dimension of language pedagogy and assessment for students growing up in a multimedia digital age. Thirty-two Year 6 students representing a sample of high, medium and low performers on an Australian state-wide school literacy test were surveyed about their internet usage and interviewed using a structured protocol while working online through a selection of materials from an educational website. Findings from the earlier stages of the project indicated that different types of image-text relations vary in the degree of difficulty they pose for students’ reading comprehension. This phase of the project extended the analysis of image-text relations to online, interactive texts. Student performance on online reading tasks and interview data are used to illustrate some of the complexities students encounter when reading online, and how this may vary with factors such as their day-to-day literacy experiences and levels of engagement. The results have implications for literacy pedagogy and assessing the reading of web-based texts.