The Role of Regulation and Processing Strategies in Understanding Science Text Among University Students

Abstract

The aim of the study was to investigate the role of regulation and processing strategies in understanding science text. A total of 91 student teachers answered open-ended questions concerning photosynthesis before and after reading either a traditional or a refutational science text. After this, they also answered parts of the Inventory of Learning Styles. Understanding of photosynthesis increased after the text reading among all the students. However, deep and independent learners reached a better understanding than reproductive and support-dependent students. The refutational text seemed to promote understanding more than the traditional text. The study supports the assumption that personal characteristics play a role in learning complex scientific concepts. Further, refutational texts seem to facilitate high quality learning.The focus of this study is to integrate three research traditions: learning strategies, conceptual change, and text comprehension research, at university level among future elementary school teachers. Studying in teacher education requires working with and combining a huge amount of information from different domains and planning one's studies carefully in order to maintain the fast pace. It is also essential to monitor and evaluate ones learning processes in order to detect possible difficulties in understanding. It could be said that effective studying provides effective learning strategies, that is, deep processing of the learning materials and self-regulating one's learning (Vermunt

The influences of text and reader characteristics on learning from refutations in science texts.

“…"), whereas others exphcitly state that the misconception is not accurate ("If you believe this, you are wrong"). Previous studies that used texts containing exphcit refutational statements such as the latter tended to produce more robust learning advantages for refutational texts than for their respective control texts (Ariasi & Mason, 2011;Mason et al, 2008;Vilppu, Mikkilä-Erdmann, & Ahopelto, 2011) or to results from other studies in which the refutation of the misconception was less explicit (Alvermann & Hague, 1989;Broughton et al, 2010). In the present research, we examined whether the refutational statement was present or not and the impact on performance in relation to prior knowledge differences.…”

A Learning Patterns Perspective on Student Learning in Higher Education: State of the Art and Moving Forward

“…This finding shows similarities with results from Lindblom-Ylänne and Lonka (2000), who found a clear and separate application-directed learning factor among advanced and adult medical students. Timarova and Salaets (2011) found that applied language students' in Belgium studied more according to a reproduction-directed pattern than a meaning-directed pattern, and Vilppu et al (2013) found that Finnish teacher students reported more deep processing than stepwise processing in their studying of textbooks.…”

Identifying User Interaction Patterns in E‐Textbooks

“…The text also discusses concept pairs and their relationships, such as energy versus matter or nutrients versus nourishment. These concepts were chosen based on previous literature, which has shown that both adults and children have difficulties understanding them [ 11 , 12 , 24 ].…”

“…In universities, the main method of science teaching is often still textbooks, in which the information is organized by topic, to be read and understood in a linear fashion [ 2 , 10 ]. However, textbooks are often not organized well enough or do not explain the phenomena coherently and rarely contain questions that require students to provide comprehensive explanations [ 11 , 12 ]. E-material is often created based on these existing textbooks, and thus the content is mostly static.…”