McNamara, D. S., & Dempsey, K. (2011). Reader expectations of question formats and difficulty: Targeting the zone. Text relevance and learning from text, 321-352.

McNamara, D.; Dempsey, K.

2011

McNamara, D. S., & Dempsey, K. (2011). Reader expectations of question formats and difficulty: Targeting the zone. Text relevance and learning from text, 321-352.

The authors examined the effects of two types of pre-reading instructions on students’ comprehension of a high or low cohesion science text. Participants (n=166) were informed that they would answer either multiple-choice or open-ended questions, and for each of these conditions, they were told that these questions would be either easy or difficult questions. After reading the text, they answered both multiple-choice and open-ended questions that varied in depth (text-based, local inference, global inference). The results indicated that text cohesion did not affect comprehension and did not moderate the effects of the instructions. Participants were sensitive to the instructions regarding the expected types of comprehension questions. Instructions that the questions would be difficult had no effect when the students also expected open-ended questions. However, when expecting multiple-choice questions, comprehension was enhanced, particularly for the most difficult questions and for the students who struggled most with the text – low knowledge readers. The results indicated that there is little to no harm in giving instructions that the questions will be more challenging, and in some cases, it may improve performance, but only when the students expect questions they will be able to answer, i.e., multiple-choice questions.

> Abstract

166

1