The current study examined the extent to which the cohesion detected in readers' constructed responses to multiple documents was predictive of persuasive, source-based essay quality. Participants (N=95) completed multiple-documents... more
The current study examined the extent to which the cohesion detected in readers' constructed responses to multiple documents was predictive of persuasive, source-based essay quality. Participants (N=95) completed multiple-documents reading tasks wherein they were prompted to think-aloud, self-explain, or evaluate the sources while reading a set of four texts. They were then asked to write a source-based essay based on their reading. Natural Language Processing techniques were used to automatically analyze the cohesion of the constructed responses at both within- and across-documents levels. Results indicated that within-document cohesion was negatively related to essay quality, whereas across-documents cohesion was positively related to essay quality. Further, these relations differed by instructional condition such that strategic instructions to either self-explain or evaluate sources seemed to promote across-text integration, compared to thinking aloud. Overall, this study ind...
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Welcome to Chicago! We are very excited and proud to be able to host the 15 th biennial meeting of the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media! This year, we have an especially stimulating program, with... more
Welcome to Chicago! We are very excited and proud to be able to host the 15 th biennial meeting of the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media! This year, we have an especially stimulating program, with keynote speakers, symposia, paper sessions, and posters that cover the full range of scientific research on issues related to how we understand, respond to, write about, and learn from literature and media. We are also excited to present several plenary addresses from exceptional researchers in our field, highlighted by Carol Lee (Northwestern University), Tim Smith (Birkbeck University of London), and Michael Young (University of Utah). The organizing committee wishes to thank the many reviewers who provided invaluable input on more than 75 submissions, and the many colleagues who pitched in and offered suggestions or assistance when needed. We also have a great group of student volunteers who have already helped us in many ways, both big and small. One...
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Research Interests: Psychology and Literacy
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Narrative, Picture Books, and 15 moreMental Representation, Static Visual Narrative, Reading Comprehension, Language, Inference, Medicine, Comics and Graphic Novels, Humans, Comprehension, Female, Male, Narrative Comprehension, Adult, Inference Generation, and Neurosciences
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Research Interests: Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Data Mining, and 9 moreCategorization, Latent Semantic Analysis, Corpus Analysis, Artificial Intelligence in Education, Text Categorization, Support vector machine, Reading Process, Regular Expression, and Springer Ebooks
The goal of this chapter is to provide the foundation toward developing a more comprehensive model of reading comprehension. To this end, seven prominent comprehension models (Construction–Integration, Structure-Building, Resonance,... more
The goal of this chapter is to provide the foundation toward developing a more comprehensive model of reading comprehension. To this end, seven prominent comprehension models (Construction–Integration, Structure-Building, Resonance, Event-Indexing, Causal Network, Constructionist, and Landscape) are described, evaluated, and compared. We describe what comprehension models have offered thus far, differences and similarities between them, and what comprehension processes are not
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Comprehension of science texts is challenging, particularly when the reader lacks the skills or knowledge necessary to fill in conceptual gaps in the text content. The iSTART system was developed to help readers learn and practice reading... more
Comprehension of science texts is challenging, particularly when the reader lacks the skills or knowledge necessary to fill in conceptual gaps in the text content. The iSTART system was developed to help readers learn and practice reading strategies to improve their ability to comprehend challenging text. This study describes a new iSTART module recently developed and tested, called Interactive Paraphrasing (IP), in which students are interactively and adaptively taught how to paraphrase sentences. We compared the effects of iSTART to iSTART with IP (IP-iSTART) with high school students on their strategy use and ability to comprehend text. IP-iSTART increased skilled readers' self-explanation quality, improved their ability to answer online comprehension questions, and increased their use of paraphrases after training. Less skilled readers benefited most in self-explanation quality from the original version of iSTART. Results are discussed in terms of tailoring reading strategy...
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This study assessed whether and how self-explanation reading training, provided by iSTART (Interactive Strategy Training for Active Reading and Thinking), improves the effectiveness of comprehension processes. iSTART teaches students how... more
This study assessed whether and how self-explanation reading training, provided by iSTART (Interactive Strategy Training for Active Reading and Thinking), improves the effectiveness of comprehension processes. iSTART teaches students how to self-explain and which strategies will most effectively aid comprehension from moment-to-moment. We used RSAT (Reading Strategy Assessment Tool) to assess how iSTART changes the relation between important self-explanation reading strategies—bridging and elaboration—and online comprehension, and how often they are produced. College and high school students received iSTART and were administered RSAT prior to and post-training. Results from three experiments showed that iSTART primarily benefits bridging inferences when self-explaining. The frequency of bridging inferences was higher post training than prior to training, but only in the experiments involving college students. Additionally, prior to exposure to iSTART, RSAT bridging scores did not pr...
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, and 13 moreNatural Language Processing, Educational Measurement, Adolescent, Medicine, Teaching, Learning, Software, Humans, Computer Assisted Instruction, Comprehension, Young Adult, Behavior Methods, and Regional health planning
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Assessment, Educational Psychology, Reading Comprehension, and 13 moreInference, Medicine, Reading Strategies, Business and Management, Correlation, Standardized Tests, Comprehension, MENTAL MODEL, Metacognition and self-regulated learning, Assessment Tool, Sentence, Reading Process, and Proof of Concept
The primary goal of this study is to assess two approaches for detecting comprehension processes in R-SAT (Reading Strategy Assessment Tool). One approach is based on Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) while the other is a combination of... more
The primary goal of this study is to assess two approaches for detecting comprehension processes in R-SAT (Reading Strategy Assessment Tool). One approach is based on Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) while the other is a combination of literal word matching and soundex. A secondary goal is to assess the potential for detecting specific reading comprehension strategies, either in isolation or combination. Participants typed “think-aloud” protocols while reading texts presented on computers. Human judges rated ...
Film is ubiquitous, but the processes that guide viewers' attention while viewing film narratives are poorly understood. In fact, many film theorists and practitioners disagree on whether the film stimulus (bottom-up) or the viewer... more
Film is ubiquitous, but the processes that guide viewers' attention while viewing film narratives are poorly understood. In fact, many film theorists and practitioners disagree on whether the film stimulus (bottom-up) or the viewer (top-down) is more important in determining how we watch movies. Reading research has shown a strong connection between eye movements and comprehension, and scene perception studies have shown strong effects of viewing tasks on eye movements, but such idiosyncratic top-down control of gaze in film would be anathema to the universal control mainstream filmmakers typically aim for. Thus, in two experiments we tested whether the eye movements and comprehension relationship similarly held in a classic film example, the famous opening scene of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (Welles & Zugsmith, Touch of Evil, 1958). Comprehension differences were compared with more volitionally controlled task-based effects on eye movements. To investigate the effects of c...
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Attention, Reading, Medicine, and 3 moreHumans, Reaction Time, and Goals
... in the text (eg, causal antecedent inferences), whereas other inferences are more global (eg, author's intent). This section discusses each of the categories of inference presented in table 2. Some of these inferences... more
... in the text (eg, causal antecedent inferences), whereas other inferences are more global (eg, author's intent). This section discusses each of the categories of inference presented in table 2. Some of these inferences are of particular interest to literary studies (eg, theme, emotion, ...