Adolescents' Constructively Responsive Reading Strategy Use in a Critical Internet Reading Task

Abstract

A B S T R A C TThe Internet is central to understanding literacies in the 21st century, and explication of reading strategies situated in Internet settings contributes to both our understanding of reading and our support of students in the Internet age. The purpose of this study was to examine the complexity of Internet reading strategies used by seven accomplished high school readers. Individual participants read on the Internet, with the goal of developing critical questions about their chosen contemporary controversial topic. Internet reading strategies were analyzed using participants' verbal reports, triangulated with complementary data (e.g., computer screen recordings). The data describe the nature and sequence of readers' strategies categorized into (a) realizing and constructing potential texts, (b) identifying and learning information, (c) evaluating and sourcing texts, and (d) monitoring and managing reading. Results demonstrate the role that these strategies play in constructing meaning from Internet texts, as well as the interactive patterns of strategy use in both open and closed Internet settings.

The New Literacies of Online Research and Comprehension: Rethinking the Reading Achievement Gap

“…Their analysis showed evidence of strategies that “appear to have no counterpart in traditional reading” (p. 217). Many strategies centered around a reader's ability to apply methods to reduce their levels of uncertainty while navigating and negotiating appropriate reading paths in a shifting problem space (see also Cho, ; Zhang & Duke, ).…”

“…Their analysis showed evidence of strategies that "appear to have no counterpart in traditional reading" (p. 217). Many strategies centered around a reader ' s ability to apply methods to reduce their levels of uncertainty while navigating and negotiating appropriate reading paths in a shifting problem space (see also Cho, 2010 ;Zhang & Duke, 2008 ). Coiro and Dobler ( 2007 ) found that online research and comprehension involved the use of offline reading comprehension skills, but that it was more complex and included a number of additional skills.…”

Toward a Dynamic, Multidimensional Research Framework for Strategic Processing

“…For instance, Cho's (2013) study that asked participants to construct critical questions about a controversial topic may allow what have been considered deeper-level strategies to be more effective than using these deeper-level strategies for recall tasks where they might not be required or even useful. Additionally, studies that examine the relation between well-and ill-structured tasks side-by-side also elucidate some of the differential effects of strategy use on performance given situational differences.…”

“…Additionally, these task and strategy differences have been reported to interact in significant ways influencing performance (e.g., Dinsmore and Alexander 2016). In some cases, it may be the case that learners would be unaware of differing task requirements, but the use of task prompts (e.g., after the reading the passage you will be asked to answer multiple choice questions about the passage) may influence the goals one sets or the knowledge one uses to complete a given task (e.g., Cho 2013;Malmberg et al 2014;Wylie et al 2012). Finally, the effects of task difficulty on strategy use (e.g., Malmberg et al 2013;Wu et al 2013b) may influence motivation or the goals of the individual as well.…”

The importance of word and world knowledge for the successful strategic processing of multiple texts online

“…For success in all these categories, it can be argued that it is not only search strategies that are necessary (emphasised by Zhang and Duke 2008;Coiro 2011a;Cho 2013) but, as an inherent part of ensuring success in these strategies, word and world knowledge. In a study of adolescents and multiple text comprehension in Norway, Braten et al (2014) found that word recognition skills were a significant factor in learning from the texts.…”