Translating advances in reading comprehension research to educational practice

The authors review five major findings in reading comprehension and their implications for educational practice. First, research suggests that comprehension skills are separable from decodingprocesses and important at early ages, suggesting that comprehension skills should be targeted early, even before the child learns to read. Second, there is an important distinction between readingprocesses and products, as well as their causal relationship: processes lead to certain products. Hence, instructional approaches and strategies focusing on processes are needed to improve students’reading performance (i.e., product). Third, inferences are a crucial component of skilled comprehension. Hence, children need scaffolding and remediation to learn to generate inferences, even when they know little about the text topic. Fourth, comprehension depends on a complex interaction between the reader, the characteristics of the text, and the instructional task, highlighting the need for careful selection of instructional materials for individual students and specific groups of students. Finally, educators may benefit from heightened awareness of the limitations and inadequacies of standardized reading comprehension assessments, as well as the multidimensionality of comprehension to better understand their students’ particular strengths and weaknesses

Examining My-Side Bias During and After Reading Controversial Historical Accounts

The present study examines individuals’ thinking during and after reading controversial historical accounts and the possible contribution of epistemic beliefs, emotions, and priorknowledge in this context. Young adults (n = 39) were asked to read two accounts about a recent war in their country, an own-side account – from a historian of their ethnic group – and an other-side account ‒ from a historian from the adversary ethnic group. Participants were asked to think-aloud and report their emotions during reading. After reading, participants were asked to write a summary. Results showed that participants exhibited my-side bias during reading and writing, while there were also interesting individual differences in epistemic beliefs and prior knowledge. Participants with evaluativist epistemic beliefs were less likely to show my-side bias in the writing task. Epistemic beliefs, along with prior knowledge and the emotion of anger, predicted also low-epistemic processing during reading of other-side text. The paper concludes with a discussion of the educational implications in promoting critical thinking about controversial issues in history

Epistemic perspective and online epistemic processing of evidence: Developmental and domain differences

Relations between epistemic perspective and online epistemic processing of evidence when reading a text were examined. Thirty-seven young adolescents and 24 graduate university students were asked to read and think-aloud with two texts, one in the history domain and the other in the science domain. Participants also completed a prior-knowledge test and an instrument assessing their epistemic perspective. Results showed that participants who exhibited an evaluativist epistemic perspective and high prior-knowledge used the epistemic standard of scientific research more than participants who held non-evaluativist epistemic perspective. Furthermore, an age-related developmental difference was observed, with adults using the epistemic standard of scientific research more than young adolescents. Domain differences were observed in both participants’ epistemic perspective and online epistemic processing. Participants overall engaged in online epistemic processing of evidence more in the history topic than in the science topic

Flattening the COVID-19 curve: Emotions mediate the effects of a persuasive message on preventive action

Introduction: Across four countries (Canada, USA, UK, and Italy), we explored the effects of persuasive messages on intended and actual preventive actions related to COVID-19, and the role of emotions as a potential mechanism for explaining these effects. Methods: One thousand seventy-eight participants first reported their level of concern and emotions about COVID-19 and then received a positive persuasive text, negative persuasive text, or no text. After reading, participants reported their emotions about the pandemic and their willingness to take preventive action. One week following, the same participants reported the frequency with which they engaged in preventive action and behaviors that increased the risk of contracting COVID-19. Results: Results revealed that the positive persuasive text significantly increased individuals’ willingness to and actual engagement in preventive action and reduced risky behaviors 1 week following the intervention compared to the control condition. Moreover, significant differences were found between the positive persuasive text condition and negative persuasive text condition whereby individuals who read the positive text were more willing and actually engaged in more preventive action compared to those who read the negative text. No differences were found, however, at the 1-week follow-up for social distancing and isolation behaviors. Results also revealed that specific discrete emotions mediated relations between the effects of the texts and preventive action (both willing and actual). Discussion: This research highlights the power of educational interventions to prompt behavioral change and has implications for pandemic-related interventions, government policy on health promotion messages, and future research

The COVID-19 Vaccine Communication Handbook. A practical guide for improving vaccine communication and fighting misinformation

This handbook is for journalists, doctors, nurses, policy makers, researchers, teachers, students, parents – in short, it’s for everyone who wants to know more about the COVID-19 vaccines, how to talk to others about them, how to challenge misinformation about the vaccines. This handbook is self-contained but additionally provides access to a “wiki” of more detailed information

The Effects of Positive and Negative Emotions on Knowledge Revision

Across three experiments, we sought to determine the effects of positive and negative emotional content in refutation texts on correcting controversial misconceptions about vaccines. The addition of negative emotional content to texts that identify, refute and explain vaccine misconceptions improved knowledge revision observed during reading (Experiment 1). However, the addition of positive emotional content to refutation texts weakened this effect (Experiment 2). A direct comparison between negative and positive emotional content provided corroborating evidence for these findings (Experiment 3). Across experiments, results show that all refutation texts (with or without positive or negative emotional content) improved learning assessed after reading. These findings show the differential effects of emotional content on revising misconceptions about a controversial topic and provide consistent support for refutation texts as an effective tool in these corrective efforts

Does Being an Expert Matter? The Influence of Source Expertise on Recognition Memory

The current information ecosystem has made it difficult to judge the veracity of information. Presumably, evaluating an informational source’s expertise aids in this judgment process. However, whether these judgements influence memory for that information is unclear. In this study, we investigate the extent to which a source's expertise influences recognition memory for explanations given by that source. Participants viewed 20 vignettes describing events and two potential explanations for each event. Each explanation was either said by a source (domain expert vs. non-expert) or given without a source. Participants were exposed to both source and no-source conditions. We investigated whether participants’ recognition of explanations were predicted by condition and source expertise. Our findings indicated that neither condition nor source expertise influenced participants' performance on the recognition task. This suggests that people either do not attend to source in their evaluations of explanations or do not encode these evaluations

A metric of children’s inference-making difficulty during language comprehension

Reading comprehension research has identified sources of children’s difficulty with inference-making: lack of semantic/content knowledge and logical reasoning difficulty. NLP tools modeling semantic knowledge (e.g. BERT) can predict adult inference-making, but it is unclear whether they can predict children’s inference-making difficulty. In our ongoing study, we will examine whether our new inference difficulty metric can predict kindergarten students’ inference-making, using empirical data from a classroom intervention (ELCII). Students were given verbal information on a topic and multiple-choice questions, which require students to draw an inference from two given scaffolds. To develop this metric, we will train BERT on children’s books and ELCII content to compute an additive inference vector, the sum of the two vectorized scaffolds. The cosine distance between the additive and correct inferences may indicate inference difficulty. Results will indicate whether a probabilistic semantic space can model children’s inferences or if other components (e.g. logic) should be considered