0000000000019564
AUTHOR
Ramiro Gilabert
Selecting information to answer questions: Strategic individual differences when searching texts
The purpose of the study was to explore students’ selection of information strategies in a task-oriented reading situation. 72 secondary school students read two texts and answered six questions per text, three of which were manipulated to induce a misleading matching between the wording of the question and distracting pieces of information in the text. The reading and question-answering were presented with the software Read&Answer. We analyzed how skilled and less-skilled comprehenders were attracted to the distracting pieces of information and how this affected reading patterns and task outcomes. Skilled comprehenders scored higher and were able to discard the distracting information. In …
Some good texts are always better: text revision to foster inferences of readers with high and low prior background knowledge
Abstract This paper presents two experiments testing whether an approach to revise a text that fosters the reader's active processing benefits both high and low-knowledge readers. A history text and two alternative revised versions, one fostering the reader's inferential activity and the other reducing it, were employed. Junior high school students with low and high background knowledge about information related to the text topic participated in experiment 1, whereas undergraduate students with low and high knowledge on both the text topic and related information participated in experiment 2. One-third of the students for each condition in both experiments read either the original passage o…
Search and Comprehension Processes in Learning from Text
We analyzed the relationships between comprehension skill and search strategies in instructional text. In two experiments, college-level readers were asked to search a computer-presented science text in order to answer different types of questions. High level questions required the integration of information across paragraphs, whereas low level questions requested the localization of information within a single paragraph. High level questions were re-read more often and they resulted in broader text search patterns. Furthermore, students who were diagnosed as good comprehenders located relevant sections of the text faster and spent more time on those sections. Poor comprehenders, on the oth…
Impact of question-answering tasks on search processes and reading comprehension
Abstract This study examined the effect of (a) high- and low-level questions and (b) reading the text before the questions asked on performance, delayed text recall, and deep text comprehension, as well as on specific text-inspection patterns. Participants were 37 undergraduate students who answered either high- or low-level questions using the software Read&Answer to read and answer questions on the computer screen. Additionally, half of the sample read first a text and then answered the questions (reading-first condition), whereas the other half answered the questions without having read the text in advance (no-reading-first condition). All participants had the text available to search fo…
Estrategias de selección de información en tareas de contestación a preguntas
ResumenEl objetivo del estudio fue investigar las estrategias de seleccion de informacion de estudiantes de secundaria en una situacion de lectura orientada a tareas. Treinta seis estudiantes leyeron dos textos y contestaron seis preguntas por texto, tres de las cuales habian sido manipuladas para inducir un falso emparejamiento de palabras entre el enunciado de la pregunta y localizaciones erroneas del texto. Analizamos si los estudiantes con buen y peor nivel de comprension contestarian con exito las preguntas y si copiarian informacion erronea a partir de un falso emparejamiento de palabras. Los estudiantes con buen nivel de comprension puntuaron mejor en preguntas y aquellos con peores …
Evaluación de las estrategias y procesos de comprensión: el Test de Procesos de Comprensión
En este trabajo se presenta un nuevo test de evaluacion de la comprension lectora llamado Test de Procesos de Comprension (TPC) que, a diferencia de la mayoria de los test en espanol actuales, esta...
Impact of text availability and question format on reading comprehension processes
Abstract We conducted two experiments to analyze how text availability and question format affect readers’ processes and performance on measures of expository text reading comprehension. Junior high school students read expository texts and answered both multiple choice and open-ended questions on a computer that recorded reading times and readers’ actions with Read&Answer software. The results showed that readers reread prior text segments during initial reading of the text more often when they knew that the text would be unavailable when answering questions than when they knew that the text would be available. In addition, readers made more search decisions in the text- available conditio…
Read&Answer, A Tool to Capture on-Line Processing of Electronic Texts
This paper is aimed at presenting Read&Answer, a tool that records reading times, one of the main on-line methods employed in text processing research. Read&Answer allows the recording, analysis and interpretation of the learner processing in order to test specific hypotheses and explain final comprehension results. First, we will describe the tool, and then we will briefly explain some research studies using the tool. We will show how Read&Answer can be used in combination with another on-line method extensively employed in text processing research, i.e., verbal protocols, and we will also compare Read&Answer with eye movement tracking, a widely accepted on-line reading times technique.
ETAT: Expository Text Analysis Tool.
Qualitative methods that analyze the coherence of expository texts not only are time consuming, but also present challenges in collecting data on coding reliability. We describe software that analyzes expository texts more rapidly and produces a notable level of objectivity. ETAT (Expository Text Analysis Tool) analyzes the coherence of expository texts. ETAT adopts a symbolic representational system, known as conceptual graph structures. ETAT follows three steps: segmentation of a text into nodes, classification of the unidentified nodes, and linking the nodes with relational arcs. ETAT automatically constructs a graph in the form of nodes and their interrelationships, along with various a…
On-line assessment of comprehension processes
In this paper we describe a new version of a former paper-and-pencil standardized comprehension test called Test of Comprehension Processes (Vidal-Abarca, Gilabert, Martínez, & Sellés, 2007). The new version has been adapted to a computer-based environment based on the moving window technique. It can be used to assess comprehension strategies of students from fifth to tenth grades (11 to 16 years old). Comprehension strategies are registered on-line using reading times and visits to relevant sections of the text during the question-answering process. Data show that the computerbased version draws similar results to those provided by the paper-and-pencil version. In addition, we identify the…
Self-Generated Explanations on the Question Demands are not Always Helpful
AbstractThis study had two main purposes. First, to measure high-school students’ task model representation under the instruction to self-explain questions; second, to test the effects of self-generated explanations on task-demands understanding and performance on questions. We designed a simple experimental situation where high-school students were asked to read two texts and answer questions. Only in half of the questions students were required to self-explain with their own words what the question was asking them for before answering. Contrary to our expectations, self-explaining the questions did not significantly affect skilled comprehenders, whereas it hindered performance in less-ski…
Una propuesta para hacer buenos textos expositivos: hacia una tecnología del texto expositivo
ResumenPresentamos una propuesta de tecnologia del texto expositivo fundamentada en los conocimientos de la psicologia de la comprension de textos. La propuesta esta basada en conjuntos de datos. Primeramente, el analisis de versiones originales y mejoradas de textos procedentes de estudios de revision de textos publicados en revistas internacionales utilizando una herramienta denominada Expository Text Analysis Tool (ETAT). En segundo lugar, en un experimento en el que estudiantes de 1° de Bachillerato leyeron un texto de Biologia en una de las dos versiones, original y mejorada siguiendo las pautas de la propuesta, y contestaron a diversas preguntas de comprension. Los resultados de ambos…
‘Método de Evaluación Dinámica Automatizado’ de Competencias Lectoras para Educación Secundaria. (EdiLEC)
Se presenta un nuevo método de evaluación dinámica de la competencia lectora automatizado para Educación Secundaria (EdiLEC). Su diseño se ajusta al marco teórico propuesto por el Informe PISA-2009 (OCDE, 2010) y los principios de la evaluación dinámica (Sternberg y Grigorenko, 2002). Esta herramienta electrónica, proporciona automáticamente mensajes de retroalimentación adaptados a cada individuo sobre el proceso y ejecución a lo largo de la prueba, añadiendo a los resultados de la evaluación tradicional de la competencia lectora la posibilidad de explorar las potencialidades de aprendizaje del estudiante. El método ha sido baremado con una muestra de 1008 estudiantes de entre 11 y 14 años…
Mapas de ideas: una herramienta para el aprendizaje escolar. Datos y comentarios para una discusión
Desde los estudios que tratan de llevar la «espacialidad del pensamiento» al propio pensamiento y aprendizaje verbal, el «mapa de ideas» ha ido difundiendose entre los educadores como una alternativa potente y facil de usar para estructurar y representar los conocimientos en ese lenguaje mixto grafico-verbal. Se describe aqui con detalle la tecnica y un ejemplo concreto de aplicacion.
Teaching strategies to create visual representations of key ideas in content area text materials: A longterm intervention inserted in school curriculum
This paper describes a long-term research in which middle-grade school children were taught how to represent visually text key ideas through idea-mapping techniques. It consists of three studies, one for each year of our research. Children were at sixth grade when the instruction began, and they were at eighth grade when it finished. Another group of children from a different public school served as control group. Instruction was very close to the real school conditions: instructors were ordinary teachers, instruction was inserted in the content area curriculum, and ordinary textbooks were regularly employed, though combined with specially elaborated materials. Results were positive in the …