Methodological Demands Provide Insight Into Reader Focus and Comprehension

• In Event: Text Relevance and Task-Oriented Reading

Abstract

Readers can differentially focus on elements of texts that are more or less integral to meeting their goals as a function of text content, the task, and their knowledge or interests. A large body of research has shown that reader attention to text elements is driven by external factors such as instructions or task goals intended to guide performance (e.g., Kaakinen & Hyönä, 2008; McCrudden, Schraw, & Kambe, 2005; Peshkam, Mensink, Putnam, & Rapp, 2011), as well as internal drives such as inherent interest in a topic, or excitement that develops as a reader becomes engaged with the text (e.g., Ainley, Hidi, & Berndorff, 2002; Alexander & Jetton, 1996; Sadoski, 2001; Rapp & Gerrig, 2006).
Educational and psychological investigations of these attention-driven effects can be broadly categorized into two types of projects. For on-line projects, researchers have examined reader attention to and understanding of texts during reading. This includes evaluation of concepts as accessed from memory during processing of texts, the ways in which readers reactivate and refer back to previous text information, and the types of inferences that may be generated during reading based on text content and readers’ prior knowledge. In contrast, offline projects have been used to examine what people remember from the texts they have read. This includes assessments readers’ recall of texts, the degree to which readers make particular decisions regarding text information, and the use of text information for subsequent decision making.
For the most part, researchers have been interested in how investigations of offline and online performance provide converging evidence for particular processing mechanisms or accounts. However, divergences between on-line and offline performance are informative with respect to the processes involved in successful and unsuccessful comprehension, as well as for identifying what readers remember from their comprehension experiences. These divergences have tended to receive less attention in the field than they should.
In the current project, we describe data from several experiments that exemplify convergences and divergences among online and offline measures. These experiments investigated moment-by-moment reading times and post-reading judgments for narrative texts. Reading times are taken as evidence of difficulty in integrating incoming text with preceding sentences, which serves as a useful marker of ongoing comprehension. Judgments provide insight into the explicit decisions readers might make for future story events based on what they have previously read. Evidence for difficulty might be expected to emerge across both measures, but as we will show, divergences across these multi-method investigations prove just as informative. In fact, the data suggest that divergences might occur precisely because focus can differentially emerge as a function of whether readers engage in tasks involving on-line or offline assessments. In other words, the particular methodology employed to evaluate reader focus and comprehension might directly guide such effects. But rather than creating problematic task demands that limit theoretical or pragmatic understandings of reader behaviors, these methodologies can be harnessed as tools for elucidating the scope of text processing.

Authors

• David Rapp, Northwestern University

• Michael C. Mensink, Northern Illinois University