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Belief bias when adolescents read to comprehend multiple conflicting texts

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Abstract

The current study examined the extent to which sixth grade students used their pre-existing topic beliefs to guide comprehension of semantic ideas within multiple conflicting texts, and the sources providing them. Adolescents completed an inventory assessing their pre-reading topic beliefs one week prior to the study. During the study, students read 6 controversial texts, completed an assessment of their metacognitive awareness during reading, and wrote an essay from memory based on information provided by the texts. A between-participants manipulation tasked adolescents to read opposing stances in an alternating format, or to read all arguments for one side prior to switching to the opposing arguments. Regarding the results, the extent of adolescents’ pro-vegetarian topic beliefs predicted their taking a pro-vegetarian stance, inclusion of more belief-consistent and fewer belief-inconsistent (pro-meat) ideas, and fewer mentions of sources in the essays. The extent of adolescents’ topic beliefs also positively predicted expressions of metacognitive awareness during reading. When contradictory stances were experienced in an alternating format, adolescents included more source information in their written essays than when they read all arguments for one side prior to switching to the opposing arguments. The findings have important implications for theories of multiple text comprehension and applications for adolescents’ everyday reading experiences on the web.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study will be made openly available in Mendeley. All materials are present in the Supplemental Materials.

Notes

  1. The mean length of students’ essays was 145.33 words (SD = 83.71). In a set of supplementary analyses, we re-ran all regressions with essay length included as a control variable. However, this did not change the predictability of prior topic beliefs in any of the analyses, with the exception that when sourcing was the dependent variable, the coefficient for topic beliefs became statistically significant already in the first step (β = -0.27, p < 0.05). Because we did not focus on the potential effects of essay length on the dependent measures in the current study, we did not include this variable in the main analyses reported in Tables 3 and 4.

  2. On average, students included only approximately 1 pro-vegetarian and 1 pro-meat idea considered to be based on prior knowledge, and 38 students did not include any such ideas at all. Therefore, these variables were not used separately in subsequent statistical analyses but were collapsed with text-based pro-vegetarian and pro-meat ideas to create more symmetrically distributed dependent measures.

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Funding

This article was funded, in part, by a Spencer Foundation grant to Jason L. G. Braasch (No. 201900066). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Spencer Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Learning Sciences, Georgia State University, Atlanta, USA

    Jason L. G. Braasch

  2. Department of Education, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Ymkje E. Haverkamp, Natalia Latini & Ivar Bråten

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Memphis, Memphis, USA

    Sabriyya Shaw & Muhammad Safwan Arshad

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  1. Jason L. G. Braasch
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Contributions

JLGB and IB Conceptualized the project, and wrote or advised on all sections of the manuscript. YEH Conducted and wrote up the analyses. NL Created the materials and wrote about them the Method section. SS and MSA Collected and entered the data, and coded the essay responses.

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Correspondence to Jason L. G. Braasch.

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Braasch, J.L.G., Haverkamp, Y.E., Latini, N. et al. Belief bias when adolescents read to comprehend multiple conflicting texts. Read Writ 35, 1759–1785 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-022-10262-w

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