The role of students’ prior topic beliefs in recall and evaluation of information from texts on socio-scientific issues

Abstract

In this research, we investigated relationships between undergraduate students' prior topic beliefs and their recall of the main conclusions from texts on controversial socio-scientific issues, to what extent students trusted the recalled conclusions, and how they justified their trust in those conclusions. While belief-biased recall of text conclusions was not observed in this study, students were found to trust the recalled conclusions more when they were consistent than when they were inconsistent with students' prior beliefs about the issues.Moreover, students primarily justified their trust in the recalled conclusions by referring to their personal opinions on the issues. Finally, students who correctly recalled text conclusions even when those conclusions were at odds with their prior beliefs about the issues outperformed students who incorrectly recalled conclusions that were consistent with their prior beliefs on measures of cognitive reflection and reported use of critical reading strategies.Theoretical as well as educational implications of these findings are discussed.

The effects of topic familiarity, author expertise, and content relevance on Norwegian students’ document selection: A mixed methods study.

“…The myside bias phenomenon implies that when dealing with controversial issues, people tend to evaluate and generate evidence, as well as test hypotheses, biased by their prior attitudes . Empirical research corroborates this view, with information consistent with people's prior attitudes more likely to be recalled, evaluated positively, and included in mental representations of situations and issues than attitude-inconsistent information (Andiliou, Ramsay, Murphy, & Fast, 2012;, 2014McCrudden & Sparks, 2014;Strømsø, Bråten, & Stenseth, 2015;van Strien, Brand-Gruwel, & Boshuizen, 2014;Wiley, 2005).…”

“…Many studies also indicate that despite knowledge about sourcing, students often fail to attend to and evaluate source features when engaged in task-oriented reading involving multiple documents (Britt & Aglinskas, 2002;Strømsø, et al, 2013;Stadtler & Bromme, 2007), and if attending to sources, students have been found to rely on superficial cues such as layout (Iding, et al, 2009) or to adopt a default stance using a general "rule of thumb" (e.g., "I trust documents written by professors and avoid articles written by journalists") (List & Alexander, 2018). The reason that students infrequently undertake a deeper analysis of author expertise is beyond the scope of the current thesis, but individual differences seem to be related to sourcing activities with prior knowledge (Rouet, et al, 1997;Rouet, et al, 1996;Braasch, et al, 2014), interest (Guthrie, et al, 2007), and prior attitudes towards the current reading topic (Strømsø, Bråten, & Stenseth, 2017;Braasch, et al, 2014;Andreassen & Bråten, 2013;Gottlieb & Wineburg, 2012). These connections are particularly relevant to the studies presented in the current thesis (see section 3.1 for further detail).…”

“…Along with this understanding of the personal and societal importance of reading is the accessibility to controversial information on socioscientific topics that are consequential for people's lives. Individuals are expected to be able to comprehend and competently act on such information when making important life decisions related to, for example, health, nutrition or climate issues (Strømsø, Bråten, & Stenseth, 2017;Ferguson, 2012;Fox, 2009). Reading about controversial socioscientific issues of potentially great personal or social relevance requires the ability to evaluate the usefulness of what is read and demonstrate multiple document reading skills (Rouet, 2006).…”

Investigating multiple source use among students with and without dyslexia

“…To research multimedia learning among adolescent readers, we considered it appropriate to present them with a topic that was both relatively complex and controversial, requiring that students identify different perspectives and integrate them into a coherent understanding. Previous topics used in similar research have concerned possible adverse health effects of consuming artificial sweeteners (Strømsø, Bråten, & Stenseth, 2017) pros and cons regarding the security of nuclear plants (Stenseth, Bråten, & Strømsø, 2016) whether mobile phone radiation can lead to cancer (Strømsø, Bråten, & Stenseth, 2017), and the topic of climate change (Stenseth, Bråten, & Strømsø, 2016). The topic we chose for this research concerned possible harmful and beneficial effects of sun exposure.…”

The Future of Learning by Searching the Web: Mobile, Social, and Multimodal

“…Previous research has shown that individuals' pre-existing attitudes or opinions about a topic can heavily bias their information retrieval. Individuals seem to preferably access websites that provide attitudeconsistent rather than counterattitudinal information (e.g., Frost, Casey, Griffin, Raymundo, Farrell, & Carrigan, 2015;Knobloch-Westerwick, Johnson, & Westerwick, 2015;Schwind, Buder, Cress & Hesse, 2012), to judge proattitudinal information as more trustworthy (e.g., Bråten, Salmerón, & Strømsø, 2016;Strømsø, Bråten, & Stenseth, 2017;Van Strien, Kammerer, Brand-Gruwel, & Boshuizen, 2016), and also to better remember it (e.g., Frost et al, 2015;Maier & Richter, 2014;.…”