In this study, we explored how elementary school students used multiple information resources in responding to a text-based argumentation task asking them to research a set of online texts in order to state and justify their stance on a controversial health-related issue. Results showed that most students took a stance that was consistent with the majority of the information resources that they read, that they mainly drew on more reliable resources in their written task products, and that they justified their stance by providing one or more supporting reasons. Students relied much more on copying and paraphrasing content from the online resources than on integrating information within and across the resources, however, and they very rarely referred to the sources in their written products. In general, girls were found to outperform boys on measures of content, argumentation, and integration in the written task products, and these aspects of the written products were also positively related to students' basic reading and reasoning skills. The discussion highlights the challenges many elementary school students experience in this complex literacy task context, suggests some avenues for future research, and discusses instructional implications of the study.
This study examined students’ ability to select relevant ideas from multiple online texts and integrate those ideas in their written products. Students (N = 162) used a web-based platform to complete an online inquiry task in which they read three texts presenting different perspectives on computer gaming and wrote an article for a school magazine on the issue based on these texts. Students selected two snippets from each text during reading and wrote their article with the selected snippets available. The selected snippets were scored according to their relevance for completing the task, and the written products were scored according to their integration quality. The results showed that most students performed well on the selection task. However, nearly half of the written products were characterized by poor integration quality. The hierarchical multiple regression analysis showed that students’ selection of relevant ideas from the texts contributed to their integration of information across texts over and above both reading fluency and reading comprehension skills. The study provides new evidence on the relationship between selection and integration when younger students work with multiple texts, and both theoretical and educational implications of these findings are discussed.
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