Abstract
Relying on multiple documents to answer questions is becoming common for both academic and personal inquiry tasks. These tasks often require students to explain phenomena by taking various causal factors that are mentioned separately in different documents and integrating them into a coherent multi-causal explanation of some phenomena. However, inquiry questions may not make this requirement explicit and may instead simply ask students to explain why the phenomenon occurs. This paper explores an Activity Model Hypothesis that posits students lack knowledge that their explanation should be multi-causal and how to engage in the kind of thinking needed to construct such an explanation. This experiment, conducted on a sample of eigth grade students, manipulated whether students received a short 10-min lesson on the nature of scientific explanations and multi-causal reasoning. Students who received this causal chain lesson wrote essays that were more causally complex and integrated, and subsequently performed better on an inference verification test, than students who did not receive the lesson. These results point to relatively simple changes to instructions that can provide the support students need for successful multiple-document comprehension.
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Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Notes
Including this measure as a covariate did not change any of the reported results.
All but one had non-significant Fs < 1, while the statistic for the interaction for comprehension test scores was above 1 but still not significant, F(1,128) = 2.11, p = .15, ηp2 = .02.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported in part by Grant R305F100007 from the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education M. Anne Britt, Thomas D. Griffin, Jennifer Wiley. The authors thank Raluca Birza, Dylan Blaum, Tara Brown, Sarah Davis, Tim George, Morgan Hager, Peter Hastings, Karyn Higgs, Tegan Michl, Alia Mohammad, Ishan Patel, Carlos Salas, Brent Steffens, Andrew Taylor, Amy Thakkar, Bianca Trigo and Patti Wallace for their contributions to this research as well as the other members of Project READi. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute of Education Sciences or the U.S. Department of Education.
Funding
This research was supported in part by Grant R305F100007 from the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education to M. Anne Britt, Thomas D. Griffin, Jennifer Wiley. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute of Education Sciences or the U.S. Department of Education.
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TDG, AJJ, MAB, and JW all made substantial contributions to the conception and design of the work; TDG and AJJ oversaw data collection; TDG, AJJ, and JW contributed to analysis and interpretation of data; TDG, AJJ, JW, and MAB all made substantial contribution to initial and revised drafts. All authors have approved the submitted version and have agreed to be accountable for the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work.
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Appendices
Appendix 1
Inquiry task instruction
All students were given this written instruction page that was also read aloud to them.
The primary purpose of reading in science is to understand the causes of scientific phenomena. This means your goal for reading is to understand how and why things happen. To reach an understanding of a new topic in everyday life, we often need to gather information from multiple sources. In today’s task your goal is to learn about the causes of global temperature changes from several documents. You will have to piece together important information across the documents to construct a good understanding. No one text will provide the answer. This task is interesting because you are the one making the connections across documents and coming up with an explanation. No author has already done the work for you. It is also important that you use information from the documents to support your explanation of the causes.
Your task is to use this set of documents to write an essay explaining how and why recent patterns in global temperature are different from what has been observed in the past. Be sure to use specific information from the documents to support your conclusions and ideas.
[Causal chain lesson occurred here, for half of the participants]
Appendix 2
Causal chain lesson
Before you begin your main task of writing an essay, I want to help you better understand what good causal explanations in science tend to look like. A lot of times when we think about why something happened, we tend to just think of one simple major thing that caused it to happen. For example, we might say, “It’s snowing because it’s cold out.” But that’s not a very good explanation, because it doesn’t tell us how the cold creates snow and it doesn’t explain why it isn’t always snowing every time it’s cold. Usually good explanations in science include the more specific steps that occur in a kind of long causal chain.
Let’s look at an example that you might be familiar with. How does energy get to our muscles? You might say “Food” and that’s a great start, but is that really an explanation? We know WHAT gives our body energy (food), but do we know HOW it gets that energy?
What about food? What do I need to do with it? I need to eat it. That’s important to know, because there are lots of things you can do with food. Now, we all know that we’re supposed to eat food. It seems so obvious that we wouldn’t bother to even say it if we were telling someone what gives us energy. But eating it is a very important part of the process. When we are trying to explain things in science, it’s important to be specific and include all steps of a process even if you think other people would already know them.
Ok, so we still don’t really have a good explanation yet. How does the energy in the food we eat get to our muscles? We digest the food in our stomachs. So now we should ask, how does that happen? Acids in our stomach breaks down the food until it is liquid and can pass into our intestines.
But we still are not finished explaining yet. Remember what our main question is that we are supposed to answer: “How does energy get to our muscles?” We’ve only explained how food becomes liquid in our intestines, so there must be more links in our causal chain. Does anyone have any ideas?
Special chemicals called enzymes break down food particles into very small and simple molecules that can be absorbed through the intestine walls. From there they enter into the blood stream where they get carried to the muscles.
We could go on and on describing even smaller steps, but at least now we have a much more complete causal explanation that connects food to the energy it gives our muscles.
Also, causal explanations might not be just a single chain. For example many foods, like bananas, contain potassium, which increases the enzymes in our intestines. This means that bananas can be added and will change the rest of the chain.
It’s not so important that every part of the explanation line up in a single chain, but that each part of the explanation is connected to other parts. When you are creating an explanation in science you should try to think about how the various pieces of information you are reading connect together in causal chains. No single text will give you all the information. To write your essays, you will need to find each of the important pieces in the different texts and make connections.
In addition, while delivering this lesson, a causal diagram was constructed on the board.
Appendix 3
Initial reading instructions (emphasis in underline and bold in the originals)
Identify Important Ideas condition:
In this activity you will read a set of documents. Later you will be asked to use this set of documents to write an essay explaining how and why recent patterns in global temperature are different from what has been observed in the past.
To help you write this essay, your task for the first part of today is to closely read the documents in this set. While reading, it may help you to underline, highlight, or paraphrase important ideas in each document. There is space for you to summarize paragraphs or the passage as a whole. You may also find it helps you make sense of the documents if you note connections across documents or questions that you have.
You can read the documents in any order you wish, but you should read the BLUE sheet first. This will give you background on what you are reading about. Please feel free to write on the documents and take notes.
You will be able to use this task and the documents when you write your essay, but for now you will focus on closely reading the documents.
Identify Possible Causes condition:
In this activity you will read a set of documents. Later you will be asked to use this set of documents to write an essay explaining how and why recent patterns in global temperature are different from what has been observed in the past.
Understanding how and why things happen usually requires thinking about how different scientific processes fit together into larger systems. So, before you write the essay, you need to understand some general background. Your task for the first part of today is to use this set of documents to find things that can cause changes in temperature.
You can read the documents in any order you wish, but you should read the BLUE sheet first. This will give you background on what you are reading about. Please feel free to write on the documents and take notes.
You will be able to use this task and the documents when you write your essay, but for now you will focus on finding possible causes in the documents.
Appendix 4
Off-task essays that did not address the prompt
Example 1
Recent studies show that temperature is changing due to global warming. Average global temperature can drop by as many as 10°. Several ice ages have occurred throughout the globes history. Giant ice bergs recently are malting because of global warming. When global warming happens all the ice or ice bergs start to melt if this happen all the penguins, polars bears they will die if humans on earth don’t go green and protect this planed. Scientists say that the sun will die in 2000 years from now. If that does happen we will only be able to see if we have flash lights or car lights in order to see outside. At night we will be able to see because of the moon that we have if that dies to then we will not be able to see at all outside when it is dark.
So please people stop global warming by not litering and also go green because if you do these to thing this planet will be the best living planet ever were human beings ever lived so please people stop global warming by throwing away garbage in a garbage can and don’t throw it on the floor.
Example 2
The Earth’s temperature has changed over the past years. Historical records of measurements from the weather stations date back to the late 1900s. Permanent ice at the North and South Poles is made from snow that has fallen over hundreds and thousands of years. From the hydrogen found in the ice cores, scientists are able to calculate what the average global temperature was in the past. During the ice ages, glaciers cover as much as a third of the Earth’s land surface. Average global temperature can drop by as many as 10°. Several ice ages have occurred throughout our planet’s history.
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Griffin, T.D., Jaeger, A.J., Britt, M.A. et al. Improving multiple document comprehension with a lesson about multi-causal explanations in science. Instr Sci (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-023-09657-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-023-09657-1