How do students integrate multiple texts? An investigation of top-down processing
- PDF / 1,334,750 Bytes
- 28 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 118 Downloads / 184 Views
How do students integrate multiple texts? An investigation of top-down processing Alexandra List 1 & Hongcui Du 1 & Hye Yeon Lee 1 Received: 23 February 2020 / Revised: 4 June 2020 / Accepted: 10 August 2020 # Instituto Universitário de Ciências Psicológicas, Sociais e da Vida 2020
Abstract
This study describes an in-depth investigation of students’ integration or connection formation across multiple texts. Students were asked to complete two multiple text tasks, differing in the number of texts that they asked students to connect and the variety of crosstextual connections able to be formed. For each task, students were asked to indicate (e.g., highlight) and explain each connection formed. Students’ connection formation was analyzed in a variety of ways (e.g., number of texts connected, types of connections identified). Across two tasks, students were found (a) to form more evidentiary (i.e., linking specific information supporting main ideas) than thematic (i.e., linking main ideas across texts) connections, (b) to identify more similarities than differences, and (c) to form comparatively low-level, rather than high-level connections, with levels of connection formation distinguished according to the degree of specificity, abstraction, and elaboration that these reflected. Implications for further research and instruction are discussed. Keywords Multiple texts . Integration . Synthesis . Comprehension Integration refers to the formation of meaningful connections between and among disparate sources or pieces of information. Integration is implicated when students try to make sense of conflicting explanations for historical events (Britt and Aglinskas 2002), to understand the causes of scientific phenomena (Wiley et al. 2009), or even to make informed medical decisions about courses of treatment (Stadtler et al. 2014). Indeed, integration has been
* Alexandra List [email protected] Hongcui Du [email protected] Hye Yeon Lee [email protected]
1
Department of Educational Psychology, Counseling, and Special Education, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA
A. List et al.
identified as a critical competency, necessary for learners to manage and benefit from the super-abundance of information characterizing life in the twenty-first century (List and Alexander 2017a, 2017b; Goldman and Scardamalia 2013; Lankshear 1999). Consistent with its importance, much work has examined integration, particularly when learners are presented with disparate sources of information or with multiple texts (Anmarkrud et al. 2014; Wiley and Voss 1999; Wolfe and Goldman 2005). Missing from these analyses has been an understanding of how students form connections across texts or the cognitive processes underlying integration. The goal of this study is to draw on verbal report data, gathered during students’ completion of a multiple text task, to validate a previously proposed four-level framework of integration, suggesting that students may generate connections among texts at four different levels of quality, specificit
Data Loading...
