Attentional strategies for studying scientific texts

Abstract

Content-area novices develop rules as to what types of information (e.g., definitions, facts, equations) are important in texts (Dee-Lucas & Larkin, 1988).The study reported here indicates that these rules influence text learning. Experts and novices read and recalled science texts. Reading times and recall for different types of content were compared for the two groups. Results indicate that novices' importance rules function as part of novices' control schema during reading, influencing their attentional processes and the resulting representation formed for the text. This was evident in qualitative differences between experts and novices in their attentional patterns and text recall. The study also found that the number of passage readings and the passage topic have a greater influence on the reading times of experts, but both groups adjust processing time according to the hierarchical level of the passage content. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for novices learning from texts.

Memory for Scientific Arguments and Their Sources: Claim–Evidence Consistency Matters

“…Schematically, one might envision the structure of an argument as a set of shown that schema-consistent information leads to a more complete and coherent structure and that structure acts as a guide during retrieval (Bower, Black, & Turner, 1979;Bransford & Johnson, 1972;Dee-Lucas & Larkin, 1988;Dixon, Faries, & Gabrys, 1988;Mandler & Johnson, 1977;Meyer, Brandt, & Bluth, 1980;Meyer & Freedle, 1984;Staresina, Gray, & Davachi, 2009;Stein & Glenn, 1979). Researchers have found a similar pattern with arguments.…”

Knowledge of connectors as cohesion devices in text: A comparative study of native-English and English-as-a-second-language speakers.

“…Frequently, however, readers read expository text in an unfamiliar domain and therefore do not have specific content schemata to help them understand the text. Instead, readers have been shown to use surface aspects of the text, as well as specific linguistic devices to make inferences about what information is important, how specific propositions are related to other propositions, and so forth (e.g., Dee-Lucas & Larkin, 1988; Goldman & Durán, 1988; Kieras, 1985). These processes are critical to the construction of a coherent internal representation of the text and meaningful mental or situation models (e.g., Johnson-Laird, 1983; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983).…”

Novice Rules for Assessing Importance in Scientific Texts

“…These information-type rules have important learning consequences. Previous %i research has found that novices spend more time on definitions than facts when reading physics passages, recall more definitions than facts afterwards, and include more definitions than facts In their summaries of physics texts (Dee-Lucas & Larkin, 1985Larkin, . 1986.…”