# 2 Reflections

DEFINING ONLINE READING COMPREHENSION 

·        How do the researchers across your three readings define online reading comprehension (or reading on the Internet)? Are there similarities and differences in their definitions?

·        How does each researcher capture what they believe to be the key features of reading on the Internet? (e.g., What tasks/measures are used?)

·        How do these definitions build on previous ideas or frameworks of offline reading comprehension that you read about earlier this semester?

·        Has much changed in the past seven years (Coiro 2007 > Kingsley & Tancock, 2014) in terms of how online reading has been defined among these researchers?

·        What theories inform the work of each researcher? Are these theories more aligned with cognitive, socio-cultural, or other perspectives of reading and literacy?

·        Do you agree with how each group of researchers define and measure online reading comprehension? Have they left anything out of their definition(s)/measure(s) that you consider important? If so, what, and why do you think your ideas are important elements of online reading comprehension?

Since Coiro & Dobler (2007), Goldman et al (2012) and Kingsley & Tancock (2013) adopt a cognitive approach emphasizing reading skills and strategies, it does not come as a surprise that they all have a similar concept of reading that view it as “an active, constructive, meaning-making process” (Coiro & Dobler, 2007, p. 217). In order to make meaning, readers need to use “strategic cognitive processes to select, organize, connect, and evaluate what they read.”  (Coiro & Dobler, 2007, p. 217) Reading online requires, besides traditional skills and strategies, new comprehension skills, strategies, and dispositions “to generate questions, and to locate, evaluate, synthesize, and communicate information on the Internet (Leu et al., 2004).” (Coiro & Dobler, 2007, p. 217). Online reading involves “using effective strategies to narrowing focus, locating information, evaluating the information for accuracy, and synthesizing it into a product that the reader can use to effectively share this information with others” (Kingsley & Tancock, 2013, p. 389).

They also agree that online reading means, inevitably, dealing with multiple texts. They claim that online reading, as emphasized by Goldman et al (2012), that it requires the construction of an integrated model, that bring together the meanings of the single texts, the connections among them and reasoning about the author, the purpose of the text, and evaluation of reliability, and its relevance to the readers’ tasks.

Online reading is seen as an inquiry task in which it is important to have a question, to know how to look for information in multiple texts, to monitor comprehension and navigation, to evaluate the sources of information and to integrate relevant information for the task.

Because reading online requires dealing with multiple and multimodal texts, in a rich, diverse and dynamic environment, these authors claim that it is more complex than print reading (pegar uma frase da coiro).

According to Goldman et al (2012), “coordinating among these many processes of navigation, selection, evaluation, connection, and monitoring increases the need for self-regulation skills” (p. 356)

Coiro & Dobler (2007) develop a research informed by three different, but complementary, theoretical perspectives. One is a cognitive view of reading that views reading as an active meaning-making process, involving the use of a set of skills and strategies. The other one is the perspective of new literacies according to which “traditional reading skills are necessary, but not sufficient, to read and learn from information on the Internet.” (Coiro & Dobler, 2007, p. 217). The third one is the theory of cognitive flexibility (Spiro, Feltovich, Jacobson, & Coulson, 1991). “According to this perspective, open-networked information spaces such as the Internet require readers to draw from and integrate multiple knowledge structures while adapting to the rapid changes from one reading situation to the next (Spiro, Coulson, Feltovich, & Anderson, 2004).” (Coiro & Dobler, 2007, p. 218)

They studied the online reading comprehension strategies of skilled sixth-graders, and using think aloud-protocol to collect the data. They focused on three aspects of comprehension that are considered important from a new literacies perspective: locate, evaluate, and synthesize information.

Goldman et al (2012), by their turn, focused on the “readers need to deal with multiple sources of information, evaluate and select information that will be integrated in his mental model about the topic”.

They used the think aloud protocol methodology to understand the processing that undergraduate students engaged in a web-based inquiry task about volcanoes using multiple Internet sources. Better learners were contrasted with poorer learners. The results of this study “indicate that better learners engaged in more sense-making, self-explanation, and comprehension-monitoring processes on reliable sites as compared with unreliable sites." Besides that, “better learners also engaged in more goal-directed navigation than poorer learners” (Goldman et al, 2012, p. 356),

This work is informed by theories of comprehension and learning from multiple texts (e.g., Perfetti, Rouet, & Britt, 1999) that articulate how models of single-text comprehension (e.g., Kintsch, 1988, 1998) need to be expanded to capture the processing of multiple texts.

This is an inherently intertextual process in which multiple sources of information are juxtaposed with one another, portions are evaluated and selected, and information is integrated as part of a process of updating the expert’s mental model about the topic (Goldman, 2004; Hartman, 1995; Rouet, Favart, Britt, & Perfetti, 1997). (Goldman et al, 2012, p. 356)

Kingsley, T., & Tancock, S. (2013) tells the teachers what they could do to help students become better online readers. They “describe four important competencies needed for Internet inquiry, what they look like in the classroom, and what scaffolds are needed to guide students to use them independently” (p. 389): (1) generate high-quality inquiry topics, (2) effectively and efficiently search for information, (3) critically evaluate Internet resources, and (4) connect ideas across Internet texts.

This text has as theoretical support the new literacy studies, that include “the many facets of reading and writing required when interacting with digital texts (Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2 008;  Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, Castek, & Henry, 2 013)”. Quoting Coiro & Castek (2011) they believe that online reading is primarily task based, as readers typically use the Internet to ask a question or solve a problem.

Another set of ideas that inform this work are the Commom Core State Standars, and the fact that they give emphasis on higher-level thinking and acquisition of digital literacy skills as reanding digital texts, evaluating sources, and developing a product.

CHALLENGES OF ONLINE READING COMPREHENSION 

·        What do these researchers suggest makes online reading comprehension so difficult? Do you agree/disagree?

·        What makes an online reader strategic?

·        How do more strategic online readers differ from less strategic online readers?

·        What does development have to do with strategic reading and online comprehension?

·        What instructional strategies do these researchers recommend with respect to how to teach online reading comprehension to learners of various ages?

Dificult (online reading)

These studies consider online reading comprehension more difficult than reading print texts because it requires:

higher level Internet inquiry skills as:

- generating high-quality inquiry topics,

- effectively and efficiently searching for information,

- critically evaluating Internet resources

- making integration from multiple sources / connecting ideas across Internet texts.

Facing a great amount or results in a search can be overwhelming for the students and discourage them from using a variety of sources in their inquiry (Kingsley & Tancock, 2013, p. 393).

Readers have to establish relationships among different parts of the text that are not signaled in the text, so readers must infer and construct them (Goldman et al, 2012, p. 356)

Students are not very critical in relation to the information they find. They “typically believe anything published on the Internet must be considered valid and reliable (Kingsley, & Tancock, 2013, p. 395).

Strategic reader

According to Coiro & Dobler (2007), skilled readers employ a range of integrative processes to aid their comprehension of text. These processes have as key elements, four kinds of prior knowledge - prior knowledge of the topic, prior knowledge of printed informational text structures, prior knowledge of informational website structures, and prior knowledge of Web-based search engines -; inferential reasoning; self-regulation; and affective variables related to efficacy and motivation. Skilled readers are motivated, have the four kinds of prior knowledge and know how to use them, make inferences (in special forward – predictive - inferences), and monitor well the searching as well as the comprehension process.

Skilled readers plan, predict, monitor and evaluate. They are actively engaged in building comprehension and accomplishing the task as they search for information.

Goldman et al (2012), concludes that the more strategic approach of some readers “was largely based on awareness of their task, their current understanding, and assessment of what they still needed to accomplish the task” (p. 376).

# strategic and less strategic reader

The study made by Goldman et al (2012), explicitly compares strategic and less strategic learners. The results show that the better learners were more likely to go to pages on reliable sites and to return to them than poorer learners were. The better learners also more sharply distinguished between reliable sites that were worth investing meaning-making processes

Better learners showed a larger differential preference to employ self-explanation and monitoring on reliable sites. Better learners’ reasons for leaving pages reflected greater planfulness and goal-directedness than those of the poorer learners, especially on reliable sites. Finally, the information/ source evaluation comments suggest a greater tendency among the better learners to take note of information quality and credibility than the poorer learners did, while relevance seemed the primary driver of the information/source evaluations of the poorer learners (Goldman et al, 2012, p. 370).

Better learners were more strategic than the poorer learners in both how and what they read. Better learners used more monitoring and evaluation processes to determine not only what they understood from the information provided but also whether it was scientifically credible or task relevant. Although decisions to visit sites were made on a similar basis—using keywords to infer the presence of information likely to be task relevant—the patterns of processing events indicated more evaluation on the part of the better learners regarding how the information that they were looking at did or did not further their understanding of volcanoes in general and the eruption of Mt. St. Helens specifically. Decisions to continue on or seek information on other sites followed from these evaluations. (Goldman et al, 2012, p. 375).

How to teach

All those authors believe that students need instruction to develop better strategies to deal with information online, and that specific instruction help students to make better online research and improve comprehension.

According to Kingsley & Tancock (2013, p. 391) reading research shows that “teacher modeling followed by collaborative inquiry tasks proved to be a successful instructional framework for Internet instruction” (Castek, 2008;  Kingsley, 2011;  Leu & Reinking, 2010). So, they recommend the use of  Internet Reciprocal Teaching (IRT) Model (Leu et al., 2008), that can be summarized in three main steps:

• Teacher-led instruction— the teacher explicitly models the actions
• Guided collaborative practice — The students work collaboratively to solve common tasks
• Inquiry — students work to apply new knowledge of skill(s)

CONNECTIONS/IMPLICATIONS/QUESTIONS/CRITIQUES

·        What connections do you see between these ideas and things happening in your teaching/learning context? Teaching practices? Student behaviors? Classroom climates?

·        What implications do these ideas have for your work in education?

·        What questions do you have? (e.g., clarifying terms, broader applications, extended wonderings, critiques)

·        Do these ideas spark any interests for your final project?

• These ideas help me understand the necessity to teach more explicitly the strategies that skilled readers use, so that students that did not develop that skill can develop or students that did not use that strategy yet might get the benefits of using it.
• When we see reading as a cognitive process, we understand that anything is simple when reading is concerned. Learning to read is difficult, and reading is not a trivial process. Reading online might be more complex because it inevitably deals with multiple sources of information of different kinds, in a more dynamic environment, requires good searching skills, and making connections that are not explicitly signed in the text, among other skills. New environments, genres, supports, require different gestures, approaches, and bring different purposes. I think it is important to notice that online reading highlights complexities that the school system did not focused much before, such as multiple source reading, multimodal texts or different modalities and supports of texts. Even locate information, that is a basic skill, Pisa (2009) results shows that students can find information in one part of the text, but they are not good at locating information that is spread out in different parts of the same document.
• Research in Brazil usually do not separate students as poor or better learners as Goldman at al did. This discomfort provoked by those labels is explained by a social approach, which believes the problem might be the system, or the measures, and not the students’ intelligence. As Hammerberg, (2004) points out “severely labeled children are a function of an educational system that demands we identify specific cognitive traits on a continuum from low need to high need” (p 654).
• I like the idea of modeling (Kingsley & Tancock, 2013), but I think we need to be careful not to make the student depending of a model or believing that that is the only way to think or read, or that different approaches to texts are wrong.

References:

Coiro, J., & Dobler, E. (2007). Exploring the comprehension strategies used by sixth-grade skilled readers as they search for and locate information on the Internet. Reading Research Quarterly, 42, 214-257.

Goldman, S., Braasch, J., Wiley, J., Grassaer, A., Brodowinska, K. (2012). Comprehending and learning from Internet sources: Processing patterns of better and poorer learners. Reading Research Quarterly, 47(4), 356-381.

Hammerberg, D. D. (2004). Comprehension instruction for socioculturally diverse classrooms: A review of what we know. Reading Teacher, 57(7), 648-661.

Kingsley, T., & Tancock, S. (2013). Internet Inquiry. The Reading Teacher.