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Abstract
Students are often asked to integrate information derived from reading multiple documents into a consistent story or model. Based on models of comprehending individual text, we predict that the structure and accessibility of earlier texts should influence one's ability to integrate a new text with previously learned material. In two experiments, we examined the facilitating effect of macro-structure focusing tasks on the integration of information from two texts. Experiment 1 found that having participants summarize a text before reading a subsequent text enhanced integration. Experiment 2 found that both answering macro-level questions and reading instructions to integrate resulted in a more integrated final representation.
Notes
1 Participants were also asked to determine the source of each event mentioned, first author or second author. This data is not presented here.
