Multiple text comprehension in secondary education. Exploring a way to improve multiple text comprehension by fostering the students to pay attention to source information or providing them knowledge on the topic, its impact when reading conflicting multiple texts, and the individual skills that can predict their further performance

Laburpena

Reading has a strong presence in our lives, its comprehension is vital. Reading comprehension is the basis to acquiree a big amount of knowledge through our lives. Reading comprehension in essential during schooling because it is a skill with presence in all the subjects during the entire school period. This dissertation has three main goals. Explore (1) how secondary students deal with a multiple text task that present two opposite versions of a conflict; (2) how a better performance can be promoted by brief prompts directed to paying attention to source information or providing basic background knowledge of the content that facilitates the comprehension of the texts to read; and (3) which single-text reading skills assessed at the beginning of secondary education can predict performance on the multiple-text reading task two years later. Two studies were carried out in order to achieve the presented goals. In the Study 1, conducted with 148 students from 9-10 grade distributed in three conditions (one control condition and two experimental conditions) tried to answer the first two objectives. To answer the first one (how secondary students deal with a multiple text task that present two opposite versions of a conflict) we analysed the performance of the control group in four different tasks: the notes taken while reading, the essay they wrote explaining the conflict, a comprehension test and a source test. To answer the second goal (how a better performance can be promoted by brief prompts directed to paying attention to source information or providing basic background knowledge of the content that facilitates the comprehension of the texts to read) each of the experimental groups in Study 1 received different prompts and their performance was compared with each other and with the control group on the same measures as above. Finally, the Study 2 tries to answer the third goal (to know which single-text reading skills assessed at the beginning of secondary education can predict performance on the multiple-text reading task two years later). To achieve it, we explore, with a subgroup of 59 students, which single-text reading skills assessed at the beginning of secondary education can predict performance on the multiple-text reading task two years later. Concretely, we explored longitudinally if three fundamental reading skills (word recognition, reading comprehension and rhetorical competence) were able to predict two years before the student’s performance in the multiple text task taking into account the same measures used for Study 1.