Exploring how relevance instructions affect personal reading intentions,reading goals and text processing: A mixed methods study

The purpose of this mixed methods study was to investigate how relevance instructions influence readers’ personal reading intentions, reading goals, text processing, and memory for text. Undergraduates (n = 52) were randomly assigned to one of three pre-reading relevance instruction conditions that asked them to read from a perspective or to read for understanding. Experimental results showed that information was read slower and remembered better when it was relevant. However, some readers spent more time reading irrelevant information, whereas others spent less time reading this information. Post-reading interviews were analyzed to explain these reading time differences. The interview data indicated that relevance instructions influenced readers’ goals and the strategies they used to meet those goals. The data sets were complementary: the quantitative data indicated differences in reading time and recall, and the qualitative data allowed us to explain why these differences occurred. These data revealed three distinct reader profiles within and across conditions, and demonstrate how relevance instructions affect reader goals, processing, and comprehension.     

Relevance and Goal-Focusing in Text Processing

This article reviews the role of relevance in text processing. It argues that relevance instructions provided by instructors and texts help readers identify text segments that are germane to a reading goal. A taxonomy of relevance instructions is presented and four basic types of relevance manipulations are considered (i.e., targeted segments, elaborative interrogation, perspective, and purpose). This article also describes a four-stage goal-focusing model to explain how relevance affects attention allocation and text understanding. Directions for future research and educational implications are also discussed.