Prompting Readers to Plan Might Negatively Affect Their Comprehension of Multiple Documents

ABSTRACT

People need to critically comprehend information across multiple sources that express contradictory viewpoints to make decisions on relevant everyday-life issues and participate in the democratic discourse. However, the processing of multiple documents depends on readers’ prior beliefs. The present study investigated the moderating effect of prompting planning on the link between prior beliefs and multiple-documents comprehension. Eighty university students participated in the study. First, their prior beliefs, prior knowledge, and topic interest were measured. Then, participants were randomly assigned to two conditions, one prompted, in which they were asked planning questions, and one non-prompted. Afterward, participants were assigned six documents presenting conflictual positions on flu vaccination, with the instruction of reading them, writing an argumentative essay, and making trustworthiness evaluations. According to the results, prompting students had a detrimental effect on argumentative essay performance, but not on trustworthiness judgments. This effect was stronger, the higher students’ prior beliefs were and the lower their task-value motivation was.

KEYWORDS:

• Argumentation
• multiple-documents comprehension
• planning
• prior beliefs
• reading motivation
• topic interest
• trustworthiness judgments

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The term was originally introduced by Fiske and Taylor (1984) as a metaphor of mind based on the recognition that humans are rarely motivated to engage in effortful and rational mental activity. According to this metaphor, the human mind is limited in time, knowledge, attention, and cognitive resources.

2. The text difficulty was calculated through the Gulpease index (Lucisano & Piemontese, 1988): 89-(letters*100/total number of words)/10+(sentences*100/total number of words)*3.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christian Tarchi

Christian Tarchi, PhD, is a Researcher in Educational Psychology (Department of Education, Languages, Intercultures, Literatures and Psychology, University of Florence, Italy). His research focuses on learning and instruction, with a specific interest on reading comprehension (of single and multiple texts), critical thinking, literacy acquisition, and narrative competence. His work has been published in referred journals, as well as presented at international conferences.