Reading in perspective: What real cops and pretend burglars look for in a story.

Abstract

Abstractattention-focusing hypothesis, readers spent more time on sentence information important to their perspective. Readers' existing knowledge structures (their schemata) influence the comprehension, recall, and perceived importance of elements that make up a text (e.g., Pichert & Anderson, 1977). In this study, two explanations of how schemata might function during encoding were tested. The selective attention hypothesis makes the prediction that activated schemata would lead the reader to identify certain text elements as important and cause an increase in processing for those schema-relevant ideas. The slot-filling hypothesis, by contrast, posits that a schema provides a ready structure into which relevant information can be easily assimilated with no more processing required. Both hypotheses predict that subjects, given different perspectives to take while reading a story, will identify appropriate text elements as most important and will recall more ideas relevant to their assigned perspective. The hypotheses differ in that only the selective attention hypothesis predicts that readers will spend more time reading perspectiverelevant ideas. Two experiments were performed. In both, subjects were assigned to three perspective conditions (burglar, homebuyer, control), and were chosen to represent three naturally occurring perspectives (police, real estate, and education students). In the first experiment, it was found that subjects rated text elements relevant to their assigned perspective as more important than perspective-irrelevant ideas. In the second study, the text was presented via a computer-assisted instruction system that permitted the measurement of reading time for individual sentences. The results confirmed the powerful role of assigned, as opposed to naturally occurring, perspective in determining the likelihood of recall. Consistent with the ,s containing Reading in PerspectiveReading in Perspective

Adapting prior knowledge activation: Mobilisation, perspective taking, and learners’ prior knowledge

“…These results were replicated by Goetz, Schallert, Reynolds, and Radin (1983) who used an expanded version of the skipping school passage. Again, participants read the story from the perspective of a homebuyer or a burglar.…”

“…Therefore, learners with lower levels of prior knowledge are assumed to benefit most from mobilisation, a strategy that provides them with a relevant context and helps them to elaborate on and extend their limited knowledge base. With increasing prior knowledge, however, learners might benefit most from a strategy that enables them to further refine their already elaborated knowledge base (i.e., schema) by filling in gaps and updating the schema (Goetz et al, 1983). Therefore, learners with higher levels of prior knowledge might benefit most from a top-down oriented strategy such as perspective taking.…”

Attentional strategies for studying scientific texts

“…Apparently, novices devote extra time to definitions as soon as they are identified during reading. This is consistent with research that indicates that readers automatically update their text representation with important text content as they read (Cirilo & Foss, 1980;Goetz, Reynolds, Schallert, & Radin, 1983;Just & Carpenter, 1980;Lorch, Lorch, & Matthews, 1985).…”

Goal-specific influences on the representation of spatial perspective

“…In addition, the fact that these tasks, and not other survey perspective tasks, showed goal effects supports an attentional role in goal-directed processing (Gagne & Rothkopf, 1975;Goetz, Schallert, Reynolds, & Radin, 1983;Pichert & Anderson, 1977;Rothkopf & Billington, 1979). If goal-directed processing affected schema instantiation, effects should have been seen for other survey tasks, indicating a broader survey perspective schema.…”