Text-belief consistency effect in adolescents´ comprehension of multiple documents from the Web (El efecto de consistencia en la comprensión lectora de los adolescentes de documentos múltiples provenientes de Internet)
Restricted accessResearch articleFirst published online February, 2020
Text-belief consistency effect in adolescents´ comprehension of multiple documents from the Web (El efecto de consistencia en la comprensión lectora de los adolescentes de documentos múltiples provenientes de Internet)
Readers often comprehend belief-consistent information from multiple texts better compared with belief-inconsistent information (text-belief consistency effect). The aim of the present study was to investigate whether adolescents’ comprehension of multiple texts is similarly impacted by their beliefs. Moreover, readers’ prior knowledge and an alternating (compared with a blocked) mode of presenting multiple texts were expected to attenuate the text-belief consistency effect. High school students read two belief-consistent and two belief-inconsistent texts on one of two scientific issues in different modes of presentation (blocked vs. alternating). A recognition task was used to assess situation model strength for each text, and prior beliefs and prior knowledge were measured before the main experiment. As expected, in the blocked mode of presentation high school students had a stronger situation model for belief-consistent texts. In the alternating mode of presentation, participants had similar situation model strengths for the different texts. Moreover, high-knowledge participants experienced a text-belief consistency effect, whereas low-knowledge participants had weaker and similar situation models for the texts.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
AikenL. S.WestS. G. (1991). Multiple regression: Testing and interpreting interactions. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
2.
AmstadT. (1978). Wie verständlich sind unsere Zeitungen? [How understandable are our newspapers?] (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Zürich, Switzerland.
3.
AndersonR. C.PichertJ. W. (1978). Recall of previously unrecallable information following a shift in perspective. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 17, 1–12.
4.
AnmarkrudØ.BråtenI.StrømsøH. I. (2014). Multiple-documents literacy: Strategic processing, source awareness, and argumentation when reading multiple conflicting documents. Learning and Individual Differences, 30, 64–76.
5.
BekerK.van den BroekP.JollesD. (2018). Children’s integration of information across texts: Reading processes and knowledge representations. Reading and Writing, online first, 1–25. doi:10.1007/s11145-018-9879-9
6.
BlancN.KendeouP.van den BroekP.BrouilletD. (2008). Updating situation models during reading of news reports: Evidence from empirical data and simulations. Discourse Processes, 45, 103–121.
7.
BraaschJ. L. G.BråtenI. (2017). The discrepancy-induced source comprehension (D-ISC) model: Basic assumptions and preliminary evidence. Educational Psychologist, 52, 167–181.
8.
BråtenI.AnmarkrudØ.BrandmoC.StrømsøH. I. (2014). Developing and testing a model of direct and indirect relationships between individual differences, processing, and multiple-text comprehension. Learning and Instruction, 30, 9–24.
9.
ChinnC. A.BrewerW. F. (1993). The role of anomalous data in knowledge acquisition: A theoretical framework and implications for science instruction. Review of Educational Research, 63, 1–49.
10.
CohenJ. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
11.
EaglyA. H.ChaikenS. (1993). The psychology of attitudes. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
12.
FaulF.ErdfelderE.LangA.-G.BuchnerA. (2007). G*power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 39, 175–191.
13.
FestingerL. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
14.
IsbernerM.-B.RichterT. (2014). Comprehension and validation: Separable stages of information processing? A case for epistemic monitoring in language comprehension. In RappD.N.BraaschJ. (Eds.), Processing inaccurate information: Theoretical and applied perspectives from cognitive science and the educational sciences (pp. 245–276). Boston, MA: MIT Press.
15.
JohnsonH. M.SeifertC. M. (1994). Sources of the continued influence effect: When misinformation in memory affects later inferences. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20, 1420–1436.
16.
Johnson-LairdP. N. (1983). Mental models: Towards a cognitive science of language, inference, and consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
17.
KendeouP.O’BrienE. J. (2014). The knowledge revision components (KReC) framework: Processes and mechanisms. In RappD. N.BraaschJ. L. G. (Eds.), Processing inaccurate information: Theoretical and applied perspectives from cognitive science and the educational sciences (pp. 353–377). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
18.
KintschW. (1988). The role of knowledge in discourse comprehension: A construction-integration model. Psychological Review, 95, 163–182.
19.
KintschW. (1998). Comprehension: A paradigm for cognition. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
20.
KintschW.van DijkT. A. (1978). Toward a model of text comprehension and production. Psychological Review, 85, 363–394.
21.
LimonM.MasonL. (2002). Reconsidering conceptual change: Issues in theory and practice. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
22.
MaierJ.RichterT. (2013). Text-belief consistency effects in the comprehension of multiple texts with conflicting information. Cognition and Instruction, 31, 151–175.
23.
MaierJ.RichterT. (2014). Fostering multiple text comprehension: How metacognitive strategies and motivation moderate the text-belief consistency effect. Metacognition & Learning, 9, 54–71.
24.
MaierJ.RichterT.BrittM. A. (2018). Cognitive processes underlying the text-belief consistency effect: An eye-movement study. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 32, 171–185.
25.
MasonL.BoscoloP. (2004). Role of epistemological understanding and interest in interpreting a controversy and in topic-specific belief change. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 29, 103–128. doi: 10.1016/j.cedpsych.2004.01.001
26.
McCruddenM. T.BarnesA. (2016). Differences in student reasoning about belief-relevant arguments: A mixed methods study. Metacognition and Learning, 11, 275–303.
27.
McCruddenM. T.SparksP. C. (2014). Exploring the effect of task instructions on topic beliefs and topic belief justifications: A mixed methods study. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 39, 1–11. doi: 10.1016/j.cedpsych.2013.10.001
28.
NickersonR. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2, 175–220.
29.
PerfettiC. A.RouetJ. F.BrittM. A. (1999). Toward a theory of documents representation. In van OostendorpH.GoldmanS. R. (Eds.), The construction of mental representations during reading (pp. 99–122). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
30.
RichterT. (2007). Wie analysiert man Interaktionen von metrischen und kategorialen Prädiktoren? Nicht mit Median-Splits! [How to analyze interactions of metric and categorical predictors: Not with median-splits!]. Zeitschrift für Medienpsychologie, 19, 116–125.
31.
RichterT. (2015). Validation and comprehension of text information: Two sides of the same coin. Discourse Processes, 52, 337–355.
32.
RichterT.MaierJ. (2017). Comprehension of multiple documents with conflicting information: A two-step model of validation. Educational Psychologist, 52, 148–166.
33.
RossL.LepperM. R.HubbardM. (1975). Perseverance in self-perception and social perception: Biased attributional processes in the debriefing paradigm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 880–892.
34.
RouetJ.-F.BrittM. A. (2011). Relevance processes in multiple document comprehension. In McCruddenM. T.MaglianoJ. P.SchrawG. (Eds.), Text relevance and learning from text (pp. 19–52). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.
35.
RouetJ. F.BrittM. A.DurikA. M. (2017). RESOLV: Readers’ representation of reading contexts and tasks. Educational Psychologist, 50, 200–215. doi: 10.1080/00461520.2017.1329015
36.
ScharrerL.RupieperY.StadtlerM.BrommeR. (2017). When science becomes too easy: Science popularization inclines laypeople to underrate their dependence on experts. Public Understanding of Science, 26, 1003–1018.
37.
SchmalhoferF.GlavanovD. (1986). Three components of understanding a programmer’s manual: Verbatim, propositional, and situational representations. Journal of Memory and Language, 25, 279–294.
38.
SchroederS.RichterT.HoeverI. (2008). Getting a picture that is both accurate and stable: Situation models and epistemic validation. Journal of Memory and Language, 59, 237–259.
39.
SingerM. (2013). Validation in reading comprehension. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22, 361–366. doi:10.1177/0963721413495236
40.
Staatsinstitut für Schulqualität und Bildungsforschung. (2018). Geo10 Lernbereich 7: Klimawandel als globale Herausforderung [Geo10 study area 7: Global warming as global challenge]. Retrieved fromhttps://www.lehrplanplus.bayern.de/fachlehrplan/lernbereich/50409
41.
van den BroekP.BekerK.OudegaM. (2015). Inference generation in text comprehension: Automatic and strategic processes in the construction of a mental representation. In O’BrienE. J.CookA. E.LorchR. F. (Eds.), Inferences during reading (pp. 94–121). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
42.
van StrienJ. L. H.Brand-GruwelS.BoshuizenH. P. A. (2014). Dealing with conflicting information from multiple nonlinear texts: Effects of prior attitudes. Computers in Human Behavior, 32, 101–111. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2016.02.057
43.
WileyJ. (2005). A fair and balanced look at the news: What affects memory for controversial arguments?Journal of Memory and Language, 53, 95–109.
44.
WolfeM. B. W.GoldmanS. R. (2005). Relations between adolescents’ text processing and reasoning. Cognition and Instruction, 23, 467–502.
45.
WolfeM. B. W.TannerS. M.TaylorA. (2013). Processing and representation of arguments in on-sided texts about disputed topics. Discourse Processes, 50, 457–497.
