The effect of reading tasks on learning from multiple texts

Abstract

This study examined the effect of reading tasks on the integration of content and source information from multiple texts. Undergraduate students (N = 102) read five newspaper articles about a fictitious incident in either a summarization task condition or an evaluation task condition. Then, they performed an integration test and a source choice test, which assessed their understanding of a situation described in the texts and memory for the sources of text information. The results indicated that the summarization and evaluation task groups were not significantly different in situational understanding. However, the summarization task group significantly surpassed the evaluation task group for source memory. No significant correlation between the situational understanding and the source memory was found for the summarization group, whereas a significant positive correlation was found for the evaluation group. The results are discussed in terms of the documents model framework.