Children's integration of information across texts: reading processes and knowledge representations.

Constructing a knowledge representation from multiple texts requires the integration of information across texts. The aim of the current study was to investigate how elementary school students integrate information across multiple text passages and, particularly, whether students use information from a prior text to improve understanding of a current text. A sample of 105 children in grades 4 and 6 participated in the experiment. The multiple-text integration paradigm was used to study integration processes across texts during reading. Recall and (application) questions were used to investigate the extent to which information from different text passages was integrated into knowledge representations after reading. Individual differences in reading comprehension ability and working memory were also considered. The results indicate that children in both grades spontaneously activate information from an earlier text to aid their understanding during reading, and that they integrate information across texts in their knowledge representations. This was the case regardless of grade or individual differences in reading-comprehension ability and working memory. These findings provide insight into the mechanisms that may be involved in the integration of information across texts.Development Psychopathology in context: schoo

The Contribution of Executive Functions When Reading Multiple Texts: A Systematic Literature Review

In the present-day knowledge society, people need to critically comprehend information across multiple sources that express diverse and contradictory viewpoints. Due to the complexity associated with this process, an important role can be played by Executive Functions, that is, cognitive control processes used to regulate mental functioning and behavior when automatized elaborations are not sufficient. The aim of this article is to review existing research on the roles of executive functions when reading from multiple texts. To identify the appropriate studies, we conducted a search in the following databases: Web of science, Scopus, PsycInfo, Eric. The search string was created by combining the terms used in past literature reviews on executive functions and multiple-texts comprehension. From the total number of 4,877 records identified, seven articles met all the inclusion criteria and were analyzed. Given the scarcity of studies on the topic, we decided to examine also eight articles reporting indirect evidence about the association between executive functions and multiple-text comprehension. Our review revealed that the study of the association between executive functions and multiple-texts comprehension is underdeveloped. The results seem to suggest that working memory is involved in surface comprehension, whereas results about sourcing and intertextual integration processes are mixed. Indirect evidence suggests that other executive functions, such as planning or monitoring, may be involved when learning from multiple texts. More research on this topic is needed given the increasing complexity of the contexts in which reading activities take place

Comprehension, Diagram Analysis, Integration, and Interest: A Cross-Sectional Analysis

The current study examines a multidimensional set of outcome variables to understand whether different pre-reading scaffolds influence students’ text comprehension, diagram analysis, text integration, and interest; and investigates these constructs cross-sectionally to identify any progression as students move across grades. One-hundred fifty-six 3rd through 6th grade students enrolled in a public laboratory school were randomly assigned to one of three pre-reading conditions intended to activate or build students’ topic knowledge. Students completed a series of before, during, and after reading activities while engaging with grade appropriate texts about the topics of ecosystems and living things. Results indicate that there were no significant differences between the three pre-reading conditions on any of the four constructs of interest. Students across grade levels performed well on multiple-choice comprehension questions, but not as well on diagram analysis questions or an open-ended integration task. Implications and future directions are discussed

Texts and Tasks in Elementary Project-Based Science

Standards-based reforms in K-12 literacy and disciplinary education call for engaging students in meaningful uses of literacy tools of reading, writing, and oral language in service of participating in disciplinary practices and building disciplinary knowledge. Despite calls for educational reform and the introduction of new academic standards, such as the Common Core State Standards (CCSSO, 2010) and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013), too few K-12 classrooms have meaningfully taken up these ideas in curriculum and instruction. For example, literacy instruction has long been divorced from knowledge building. Further, limited instructional time for disciplinary instruction in elementary classrooms poses challenges to achieving the objectives outlined in rigorous standards-based reforms. One approach to addressing these problems is the thoughtful integration of literacy and science instruction in the elementary grades. In this dissertation study, I investigated the design and enactment of texts and tasks in an elementary project-based science curriculum. The following research questions guided this study: (1) How do texts and related tasks, designed for – and enacted in – project-based science instruction, support or constrain third-graders’ knowledge building and development of foundational and disciplinary literacies? (2) How might modifications to texts and tasks within the designed curriculum better support third-graders’ knowledge building and literacy development? This study took place in one third-grade classroom with 31 students and their teacher across a full year of project-based science instruction. The focal curriculum, Multiple Literacies in Project-based Learning (MLs), integrates science, English language arts, and mathematics, and addresses the three-dimensional learning goals of the NGSS and select CCSS. Within and across MLs units, students had multiple opportunities to read and interpret a variety of traditional print, multimodal, and digital texts. The teacher was an experienced elementary school teacher and a second-year participant in the MLs project. I used design-based research (Brown, 1992; Collins, 1992) and case study methods (Stake, 1995) to investigate the design, enactment, and improvement of focal texts and tasks. I used conjecture mapping (Sandoval, 2014) to identify salient and theoretically compelling features of the design of the instructional intervention, focused on literacy integration, and to map how features of the designed curriculum and the teacher’s enactment worked together to produce specific outcomes. Data sources for this study included field notes and videos of classroom observations, interviews with focal students and their teacher, artifacts, and the designed curriculum materials. Focal students were selected to represent a range of reading achievement and to reflect the demographics of the class. Findings indicated that: (a) the pairing of texts and tasks in the context of project-based science instruction created meaningful purposes for students to read and interpret multimodal informational texts; (b) the design and enactment of texts and tasks engaged students in using text in service of disciplinary knowledge-building and practice, creating opportunities for – and supporting – students’ science and literacy learning; and (c) texts served as tools for creating and sustaining coherence in PBL. I also identified missed opportunities within the design and enactment of the curriculum, which may have constrained students’ opportunities to learn in the context of project-based science instruction. These findings can inform revisions to the design of the MLs curriculum, and have implications for future curriculum design, the availability and use of informational text in elementary-grade classrooms, and educational policy.PHDEducational StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144100/1/mfitzge_1.pd

The Comprehension of Expository Science Texts Among Year 6 Students

This study examined the influence of instruction in text feature knowledge and metacognitive strategies on the comprehension of expository text among Year 6 students. Over a period of 8 weeks, twelve Year 6 students read a series of 10 expository science texts with diagrams. An Intervention Group comprised of six students received instructional lessons that emphasised recognition of text features, integration of information across text features and identifying a navigational pathway. A Control Group, of a further six students, read the same material however, they did not receive instruction relating to metacognitive strategies and text features. Comprehension of each text was measured by multiple choice questions, pre and post knowledge assessment, and written response. Metacognitive awareness was measured pre and post intervention using a modified Metacognitive Strategy Index (MSI) (Schmitt, 1990). The study took a mixed methods approach. Qualitative data was analysed by thematic analysis. Quantitative data presents descriptive statistics that indicate differences between and within Intervention and Control Groups. Findings indicate that students benefit from explicit instruction in metacognitive strategies and text feature knowledge

Balancing the equation: New times and new literacies = New LOTE teaching knowledge base demands

I was invited to the MLTAQ Conference, not as a LOTE specialist, nor even as a (competent) LOTE speaker, but to offer some perspectives and participate in conversations about the teaching of LOTE, in particular, the complexities that arise from ‘New Times’ (Hall, 1996a; Anstey, 2002) and ‘New Literacies’ (The New London Group, 2000; Anstey, 2002; Kalantzis & Cope, 2005). My presentation was founded on empirical research undertaken as part of my doctoral thesis (Exley, 2005) where I examined the knowledge bases of three Queensland teachers (two LOTE teachers and one Studies of the Society and Environment – SOES - teacher) providing EFL (English as a Foreign Language) instruction to secondary students in a village area of Indonesia. This research found that in current times, teachers drew on four interrelated professional knowledge bases: content knowledge, pedagogic knowledge, and knowledge of their own and their students’ pedagogic identities. The currency of the study’s findings for present debates in and about LOTE teaching in Queensland were explicated through an analysis of (i) Education Queensland’s frameworks for literacy, ‘Literate Futures: Reading’ (Anstey, 2002), (ii) pedagogic knowledge, ‘Productive Pedagogies’ (Education Queensland, 2002), (iii) my experiences as the Japanese Internship coordinator, and (iv) data from the three language teachers that focused on their own and their students’ pedagogic identities. The plenary was presented as an auditing framework for LOTE teachers’ professional knowledge bases. Teachers were invited to consider both their strengths and possible gaps and from this identify topics for future school- or association-based professional development

Political Text Scaling Meets Computational Semantics

During the last fifteen years, automatic text scaling has become one of the key tools of the Text as Data community in political science. Prominent text scaling algorithms, however, rely on the assumption that latent positions can be captured just by leveraging the information about word frequencies in documents under study. We challenge this traditional view and present a new, semantically aware text scaling algorithm, SemScale, which combines recent developments in the area of computational linguistics with unsupervised graph-based clustering. We conduct an extensive quantitative analysis over a collection of speeches from the European Parliament in five different languages and from two different legislative terms, and show that a scaling approach relying on semantic document representations is often better at capturing known underlying political dimensions than the established frequency-based (i.e., symbolic) scaling method. We further validate our findings through a series of experiments focused on text preprocessing and feature selection, document representation, scaling of party manifestos, and a supervised extension of our algorithm. To catalyze further research on this new branch of text scaling methods, we release a Python implementation of SemScale with all included data sets and evaluation procedures.Comment: Updated version - accepted for Transactions on Data Science (TDS

Multiliteracies, Pedagogy and Identities:Teacher and Student Voices from a Toronto Elementary School

In this article, I draw on an ethnographic case study of one Toronto elementary school, as part of a Canada‐wide action research project: Multiliteracy Project (www.multiliteracies.ca). I have explored how Perminder, a grade‐4 teacher, devel‐ oped a multiliteracies pedagogy, drawing on her own and her students’ identities and linguistic and cultural forms of capital to create learning opportunities for all students to access the English mainstream curriculum. Alternative pedagogical choices in‐ cluded students’ creation of multimodal dual language “identity texts” (Cummins, Bismilla, Cohen, Giampapa, & Leoni, 2005a), and identity work, expanding literacy practices valued within Canadian classrooms. Key words: critical pedagogies, critical literacies, ESL/EAL, identities, Multilit‐ eracy Project, urban schools Dans cet article, l’auteure part d’une étude de cas ethnographique portant sur une école primaire de Toronto, étude réalisée dans le cadre d’un projet de recherche‐ action pancanadien, The Multiliteracy Project (www.multiliteracies.ca). Elle analyse comment Perminder, une enseignante de 4e année, a mis au point une pédagogie en matière de multilitératies. Puisant dans sa propre identité et dans celles de ses élèves ainsi que dans diverses formes de capital linguistiques et culturelles, elle offre à tous ses élèves la possibilité d’apprendre et ainsi d’avoir accès au curriculum standard en anglais. Parmi les choix pédagogiques novateurs figuraient la création par les élèves de « textes identitaires » (Cummins et coll. 2005a) multimodaux en deux langues et des travaux portant sur l’identité, élargissant ainsi les pratiques en matière de littéra‐ tie jugées utiles dans les classes canadiennes. Mots clés : pédagogies critiques, littératies critiques, ESL/EAL, identités, The Multiliteracy Project, écoles urbaines.

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web