Specific relevance instructions promote selective reading strategies: evidences from eye tracking and oral summaries

Abstract

Background The present study analysed how relevance instructions affect eye movement patterns and the performance in a summary task of six expository texts. Methods Forty‐one undergraduate students participated in the experiment; half of them were instructed to make an oral summary of the main ideas focusing on the ‘why’ question that appeared at the end of the first paragraph (specific relevance instruction), while the other half were instructed to make an oral summary of the main ideas of the text (general relevance instruction). Results Eye movement patterns revealed that specific instructions promoted more and longer fixations and more regressions for relevant information than general instructions. A higher percentage of words in the summary task related to relevant information was recalled when readers received specific instructions. Conclusions These findings suggest that relevance instructions influence how readers enact strategies to meet their reading goals and how these strategies are reflected on memory.

Selective attention to question-relevant text information precedes high-quality summaries: Evidence from eye movements

“…The present results are in line with previous studies showing that task-relevance increases processing effort and subsequent recall of text information [ 21 , 25 , 26 , 8 , 9 , 16 ], and expand these earlier findings by showing that there are individual differences in how readers make use of this selective attention strategy. Unfortunately, on the basis of the current data, it is impossible to say what the underlying factor for these differences is.…”

“…The present study examined how readers who produce good quality summaries process text information during the course of reading. The results showed that readers who demonstrate good summarization skills show strategic reading behavior (Hyönä et al, 2002) and utilize a selective processing strategy (Kaakinen et al, 2002(Kaakinen et al, , 2003León, Moreno, Escudero, Olmos, Ruiz & Lorch, 2019): they spend more time reading question-relevant than question-irrelevant paragraphs, and this preference is seen already during the first-pass reading of the relevant paragraphs. Readers who produce high quality summaries also do longer look-backs to the relevant paragraphs.…”

“…Prereading questions are an example of a specific reading task that efficiently guides readers’ attention to certain information in text and improves memory for it [ 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 ]. Lewis and Mensink [ 26 ] conducted two experiments in order to test the benefits of prereading questions for increasing attention to and recall of relevant sentences in texts.…”

“…On the basis of previous eye-tracking studies on expository text reading [ 52 , 24 , 21 , 25 ], we expected that there are consistent individual differences between readers in the processing strategies they use while they are reading. Previous research suggests that some readers who are more sensitive to topic relevant information tend to use a selective reading strategy, in which they devote additional resources to this information and make frequent rereading and looking back to the relevant sections of the text in order to integrate information in memory.…”

Leer en contextos de distracción: el rol de la inhibición y el establecimiento de objetivos en la comprensión de textos académicos digitales

“…Como consecuencia de ello, solo aquella información del texto que es relevante para cumplir con el objetivo lo será también para el lector (McCrudden, 2011;McCrudden y Schraw, 2007). Este tipo de lector, por lo tanto, focalizará su atención en el procesamiento de aquellos segmentos textuales que contienen información relevante para la tarea a desarrollar (Cerdán et al, 2013;León et al, 2019). En este estudio se emplearon instrucciones de relevancia, con el objetivo de gatillar un procesamiento focalizado y eficiente del texto, permitiendo que el lector definiera objetivos a partir de las instrucciones (McCrudden y Schraw, 2007).…”