The effects of question previewing on response accuracy and text processing: An eye-movement study

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Reading Comprehension Research

Background:

• Reading comprehension strategy instruction is crucial for academic success.
• Understanding how different reading strategies impact test performance is essential for effective teaching.
• Student characteristics like reading achievement and working memory capacity may influence strategy effectiveness.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the impact of two reading strategies (reading questions first vs. passage first) on reading comprehension test performance.
• To explore the relationship between reading strategy effectiveness and student characteristics (reading achievement, working memory capacity).
• To analyze eye movement data to understand differences in reading processes.

Main Methods:

• Monitoring participants' eye movements while they read passages and answer multiple-choice questions.
• Comparing performance based on reading strategy (questions first [QF] vs. passage first [PF]).
• Analyzing response accuracy, reading time on words, total task time, and time spent on question-relevant text, considering grade level and student characteristics.

Main Results:

• Limited impact of reading strategy on overall response accuracy; only eighth graders showed better accuracy with QF.
• Passage first (PF) strategy was associated with more efficient test-taking processes.
• PF led to longer reading times on words (potentially better mental models), less total task time, and more successful search strategies.

Conclusions:

• The choice of reading strategy can influence the efficiency of reading comprehension test-taking.
• The passage first (PF) strategy appears more beneficial for developing deeper text understanding and efficient information retrieval.
• Findings suggest tailoring strategy instruction to student characteristics and grade levels for optimal reading comprehension outcomes.