Contributions of Causality Processing Models to the Study of Discourse Comprehension and the Facilitation of Student Learning

Gender-based violence in Latin America (Ecuador and Argentina): current state and challenges in the development of psychoeducational materials

“…This preliminary finding suggests that promoting that students focus on their emotions facilitates that they activate and elaborate on those statements that have high causal connectivity to a greater extent than asking them to focus on the speaker's emotions. This is important, given that these statements play a key role in the construction of a coherent representation of the material [ 15 , 16 , 95 ]. In consequence, promoting that students get emotionally involved appears to facilitate that they elaborate on statements that are key to comprehend and learn from the material.…”

“…Taking into account these preliminary findings, we can propose that it can be useful that future studies continue examining the effect of the design, selection and presentation of materials that promote the comprehension of topics related to the prevention of GBV. These materials should promote the establishment of discourse connections (not only causal, but also adversative, additive [ 15 , 67 , 104 ]), and facilitate that participants get actively engaged in learning about this topic (for example, through the presentation of elaborative question answering tasks ). It would also be interesting that future studies examined whether participants’ active learning can be facilitated by asking participants to perform other tasks that promote comprehenders’ oriented processes, such as self explanation and note-taking [ 14 , 94 ].…”

“…This gap is important, given that these materials are key to promote that participants learn about how to identify whether themselves, their relatives or friends are in a in relationship that could involve GBV, and how to intervene early [51] The development of psychoeducational materials that facilitate learning about the prevention of GBV can be challenging, because they need to be based on effective prior research [17,56]. In relation to this, prior studies on the facilitation of learning from narrative and expository discourse have not tended to focus on spontaneously produced materials on social issues such as GBV, but rather on research-created materials on other topics [14,15,17,57]. In consequence, we do not know if their conclusions apply to the comprehension of materials on this social issue.…”

“…These questions are expected to promote the integration of the comprehender's prior knowledge with the new information provided by the text or discourse [84][85][86][87][88]. Considering the importance of these factors for discourse comprehension [15,70,83,[89][90][91][92], current work in our lab is examining their role in the facilitation of the comprehension of GBV psychoeducation materials. In order to explore this topic, we asked a group of Ecuadorian female students to listen or read a 10-min interview with an Ecuadorian survivor of GBV focused on prevention [17].…”

Dificultades en la generación de inferencias causales en la lectura de textos narrativos en estudiantes de 4. grado de educación primaria

“…La remediación de estos procesos implicaría también hacer explícito algunas estrategias de reposición del error que permita reparar la comprensión en el proceso de lectura. Reconstruir con los estudiantes la estructura o el tipo de relaciones causales en el texto o encontrar el tejido de las relaciones causales podría ayudar a los estudiantes a mejorar su comprensión, como señalan Cevasco y Van den Broek (2019). Para ello, es importante, por un lado, ofrecer como parte de los materiales de trabajo en aula textos que presenten una diversidad de relaciones causales a partir de los cuales los estudiantes puedan experimentar y reconstruir las relaciones causales hacia adelante y hacia atrás, distantes o contiguas.…”