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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Effects of personal epistemology beliefs, task conditions and prior knowledge on understanding of multiple texts.

subject

description

One of the major challenges of a knowledge society is that students as well asother citizens must learn to understand and integrate information from multiple textualsources. Still, tasks and reader characteristics that may facilitate or constrain suchintertextual processes are not well understood by researchers. In four studies, wecompare the effects of summary and argument essay tasks when undergraduates readseven different texts on a particular scientific topic and we examine whether theseeffects are moderated by some characteristics of the reader.In the first study, we explore and compare the dimensionality of personalepistemology with respect to climate change across the contexts of Norwegian andSpanish students. Additionally, we examine relationships between topic-specificepistemic beliefs and the variables of gender, topic knowledge, and topic interest in thetwo contexts. Even though considerable cross-cultural generalizability in dimensionalitywas demonstrated, this research also draws attention to the cultural embeddedness oftopic-specific epistemic beliefs.In the second study, we compare the effects of summary and argument taskson the students' comprehension and integration about climate change and, using theSpanish results of the first study, we examine whether the effect of tasks might beinfluenced by students' epistemic beliefs. Contrary to our predictions, we found that aninstruction to write summaries may lead to better understanding and integration than aninstruction to write argument essays. We also found that beliefs about the certainty ofknowledge in some instances can moderate the effect of task on comprehensionperformance.The third and the fourth experiment were designed to clarify previous conflictingfindings regarding the effects of summary and argument tasks on the understanding ofmultiple texts. We examine whether the effect of both tasks may be dependent onsome characteristics of the learning situation (i.e. reading amount and readingenvironment) or on reader's prior knowledge of the topic. Results showed that anargument task is not always beneficial in comparison to a summary task and indicatedthat differences in prior knowledge can influence effect of task on both surface anddeep understanding of multiple documents. Educational implications are discussed.