What does it take to deal with academic literature?: Epistemic components of scientific literacy

Abstract

The skills required for understanding and evaluating academic literature include a broad repertoire of different reading strategies, which are rarely explicitly taught and go beyond classical learning strategies that foster learning from expository texts. This chapter proposes a taxonomy of strategies for reading academic literature, which distinguishes between two different processing goals (receptive vs. epistemic) and processing modes (systematic vs. heuristic). Recent research on epistemic-systematic reading strategies, diagnostic instruments to assess these strategies, and training interventions to foster these strategies is described in more detail. Finally, the chapter provides an outlook on further research that includes epistemic-heuristicreading strategies as another key component of scientific literacy.