Hypertext versus Footnotes: High School English Learners’ Online Reading Recall

This study considers forty adolescent English Language Learners who read a passage online containing additional information available through either hypertext links or footnotes. Participants were attending a special high school for English learners at the time of the study. Two versions of the text were offered, one with hypertext and the other with footnotes, and participants were randomly assigned to the footnote or hypertext condition. Answers to multiple choice questions showed no significant difference between groups in recall of the reading under the two conditions, in contrast with an earlier study of learners in higher education settings whose recall of reading with hypertext was significantly lower than with footnotes. Learners’ ratings of perceived comprehensibility of the 2 texts was also not significantly different. Additional interpretive data came from focus group interviews involving all of the participants

Patterns of Text Readability in Human and Predicted Eye Movements

It has been shown that multilingual transformer models are able to predict human reading behavior when fine-tuned on small amounts of eye tracking data. As the cumulated prediction results do not provide insights into the linguistic cues that the model acquires to predict reading behavior, we conduct a deeper analysis of the predictions from the perspective of readability. We try to disentangle the three-fold relationship between human eye movements, the capability of language models to predict these eye movement patterns, and sentence-level readability measures for English. We compare a range of model configurations to multiple baselines. We show that the models exhibit difficulties with function words and that pre-training only provides limited advantages for linguistic generalization

Print versus digital texts: understanding the experimental research and challenging the dichotomies

This article presents the results of a systematic critical review of interdisciplinary literature concerned with digital text (or e-text) uses in education and proposes recommendations for how e-texts can be implemented for impactful learning. A variety of e-texts can be found in the repertoire of educational resources accessible to students, and in the constantly changing terrain of educational technologies, they are rapidly evolving, presenting new opportunities and affordances for student learning. We highlight some of the ways in which academic studies have examined e-texts as part of teaching and learning practices, placing a particular emphasis on aspects of learning such as recall, comprehension, retention of information and feedback. We also review diverse practices associated with uses of e-text tools such as note-taking, annotation, bookmarking, hypertexts and highlighting. We argue that evidence-based studies into e-texts are overwhelmingly structured around reinforcing the existing dichotomy pitting print-based (‘traditional’) texts against e-texts. In this article, we query this approach and instead propose to focus on factors such as students’ level of awareness of their options in accessing learning materials and whether they are instructed and trained in how to take full advantage of the capabilities of e-texts, both of which have been found to affect learning performance

Advancing NLP with Cognitive Language Processing Signals

When we read, our brain processes language and generates cognitive processing data such as gaze patterns and brain activity. These signals can be recorded while reading. Cognitive language processing data such as eye-tracking features have shown improvements on single NLP tasks. We analyze whether using such human features can show consistent improvement across tasks and data sources. We present an extensive investigation of the benefits and limitations of using cognitive processing data for NLP. Specifically, we use gaze and EEG features to augment models of named entity recognition, relation classification, and sentiment analysis. These methods significantly outperform the baselines and show the potential and current limitations of employing human language processing data for NLP

Syntactic Complexity in Reading Comprehension: An Eye-Tracking Study of Text Processing Among Bilinguals and Monolinguals

For Chinese students, studying in a country with different cultural components and language structures is challenging. Compared to English, the Chinese prefers shorter and simple sentence structure and allows for two sentences to be stated side by side. Different sentence structures in Chinese may influence native-Chinese readers’ understanding of English sentences and even a whole text. This exploratory study examined whether there were any differences between English monolingual and Chinese-English children while reading varied English texts with simple or complex structures at different reading difficulty levels. This study explored the differences across texts and readers, as well as the possible effect of first-language transfer on text comprehension behavior. Behavioral and eye-tracking data, including accuracy of true/false questions, reading speed, and first fixation duration were analyzed. For true/false questions, both groups answered the questions with sufficient accuracy, indicating basic understanding of the brief passages. For reading speed and first fixation duration, as expected, monolinguals read faster with shorter fixations than bilinguals across all passages and monolinguals revealed faster reading speed for easy passages than for hard passages. However, no difference was found between easy and hard passage reading for bilinguals, which was surprising, suggesting that vocabulary difficulty may not have influenced reading speed. Additionally, the findings that no differences for reading difficulty or syntactic complexity between or within each group in first fixation duration were unexpected. To examine whether participants’ offline behavioral test scores (i.e., language, reading and cognitive capacity) influenced the relationship between first fixation duration and syntactic complexity or reading difficulty, the offline behavioral test scores were added into analysis. According to the results, monolinguals performed expectedly with stronger influence of reading and cognitive capacities on complex structure passages. However, bilinguals appeared to attend to the simple structure passages as expected, but not complex passages. Results suggest that English complex structures may have been too difficult for bilinguals to apply reading knowledge or cognitive ability for text processing or bilinguals were less responsive to the syntactic complexity due to their first-language transfer

Instructional Message Design: Theory, Research, and Practice

Message design is all around us, from the presentations we see in meetings and classes, to the instructions that come with our latest tech gadgets, to multi-million-dollar training simulations. In short, instructional message design is the real-world application of instructional and learning theories to design the tools and technologies used to communicate and effectively convey information. This field of study pulls from many applied sciences including cognitive psychology, industrial design, graphic design, instructional design, and human performance technology to name just a few. In this book we visit several foundational theories that guide our research, look at different real-world applications, and begin to discuss directions for future best practice. For instance, cognitive load and multimedia learning theories provide best practice, PowerPoint and simulations are only a few of the multitude of applications, and special needs learners and designing for cultural inclusiveness are only two of many areas where effective messages design can improve outcomes. Studying effective instructional message design tools and techniques has and will continue to be a critical aspect of the overall instructional design process. Hopefully, this book will serve as an introduction to these topics and inspire your curiosity to explore further