ERIC Number: ED641230
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2023
Pages: 109
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: 979-8-3811-4508-3
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Evaluating Strategies for Focusing on What Is Important: Text Presentation and Comprehension
Sarah Ann Barry
ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, Fordham University
This quantitative study endeavored to compare a new strategy of making irrelevant information less salient with a common reading strategy of highlighting to determine which would best aid students in making connections within and between multiple texts. Participants were 60 high school students, ranging in age from 14-17 years old. The adolescents were placed into one of three conditions: highlight relevant information, fade irrelevant information, or read-only. After reading two informational texts using their assigned strategy, the participants responded to a prompt that required them to use information from both texts. The number of inferences included in the participants' responses was counted to ascertain whether the type of reading strategy affected the synthesis of information within and between articles. Although this experiment did not yield significant differences in the number of inferences made, participants in all conditions had high levels of integration, suggesting that the controlled variables in the experiment (giving the prompt prior to reading and reading through each text twice) facilitated synthesis. This study has important implications for future research on multiple text comprehension and for application in instructional settings. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]
Descriptors: High School Students, Reading Strategies, Reading Comprehension, Relevance (Education), Prompting, Inferences, Reading Processes, Information Sources, Text Structure, Critical Reading
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Publication Type: Dissertations/Theses - Doctoral Dissertations
Education Level: High Schools; Secondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A