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Published on: October 18, 2018
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The Effect of Relevance on Children's Multiple Text Reading: Evidence From Eye Movements
Tuomo Häikiö1, Oksana Kanerva2, Norbert Erdmann3
1Department of Psychology and Speech-Language Pathology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland.
Scandinavian Journal of Psychology
|April 16, 2026
Summary
Finnish children focused longer on relevant text sections during inquiry tasks, with reading skills influencing this attention. However, this focus did not translate to better essay writing, suggesting a gap in memory formation.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Educational Psychology
- Reading Science
Background:
- Understanding how children process information from multiple texts is crucial for educational development.
- Inquiry-based learning requires students to identify and integrate relevant information effectively.
- The interplay between reading skills, eye movements, and task performance needs further investigation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how Finnish children's eye movements reflect the processing of task-relevant versus task-irrelevant information in expository texts.
- To examine the relationship between reading skills (technical skill and comprehension) and the modulation of attention to text relevance.
- To determine if eye movement patterns during reading predict essay quality after an inquiry task.
Main Methods:
- An eye-tracking experiment was conducted with 24 fifth and sixth-grade Finnish children.
- Participants read two science texts containing relevant and irrelevant segments for a given inquiry task.
- Reading skills were assessed independently, and participants wrote an essay post-reading.
Main Results:
- Children spent more time reading task-relevant segments than irrelevant ones during initial reading (first-pass).
- Reading comprehension ability influenced attention: weaker comprehenders showed fewer regressions in irrelevant text.
- Better technical readers exhibited a more pronounced effect of relevance on look-back behavior.
Conclusions:
- Children can identify and adjust reading to text relevance based on their skill level.
- Despite adjusted reading patterns, participants did not form robust memory representations for effective essay writing.
- Reading strategies and memory consolidation may be distinct processes influenced differently by reading skills.
