The concreteness of titles affects metacognition and study motivation

Students' abilities to formulate exhaustive titles as a key to comprehending arguments

“…Studies show that students often encounter difficulties understanding and constructing such texts (Mauli et al., 2014; Orsolini, 1993), and efforts to overcome those difficulties are made, for example, by developing a web‐based interactive argumentation system (Fan et al., 2020). These difficulties are expressed at all education levels: from preschoolers who encounter difficulties using arguments to justify their claims (Stein & Miller, 1993), through school students whose metacognitive text expectations were found to be affected by the extent of title concreteness (Lippmann et al., 2019); to older students and adults who find it hard to present appropriate justifications and to argue with counterclaims, and tend to base their claims on explanations more than on evidence (Kuhn, 1991). Moreover, in the context of our era, researchers observed how students identify the central message of long texts when reading from online sources, and found that students use 10 different spontaneous strategies to generate main idea statements, but that the key messages are usually not comprehended independently without mediation (Ramsay & Sperling, 2011).…”