M Anne Britt
Biographic Data
| ID | 75404 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Anne Britt |
| GIVEN NAMES | M Anne |
| FAMILY NAME | Britt |
| SIGNATURE | BRITT M A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northern Illinois University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2328-4096 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 62 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Introduction to the special issue
Reading for university or for myself? Effects of context and beliefs about science on college students’ document selection
International audience
Improving multiple document comprehension with a lesson about multi-causal explanations in science
Reading Contexts, Goals, and Decisions
The spread of digital technology has prompted an increase in the amount of written text that gets produced and disseminated daily, together with a diversification of reading contexts and purposes. In this article, we propose that modern reading increasingly relies on readers’ ability to set up and manage their own reading goals and decisions. We outline our RESOLV theory of purposeful reading and we reflect on students’ preparedness for reading i…
Do you know what you are reading for? Exploring the effects of a task model enhancement on fifth graders' purposeful reading
Background Drawing on theories of purposeful reading, this study explored task conditions that support fifth graders' selective reading of documents in order to answer questions. More specifically, we investigated whether promoting students' elaboration of their task model increases task performance. Methods Participants had to answer series of questions by searching documents for the relevant information. Half the participants received a task mo…
From simple agents to information sources
The study examined how readers integrate information from and about multiple information sources into a memory representation. In two experiments, college students read brief news reports containing two critical statements, each attributed to a source character. In half of the texts, the statements were consistent with each other, in the other half they were discrepant. Each story also featured a non-source character (who made no statement). The …
Building mental models from multiple texts
Text comprehension theories propose that readers try to achieve a coherent representation of the situation depicted in a text. When reading multiple texts on the same topic, however, achieving a coherent representation of a situation poses additional challenges. Different sources may offer inconsistent descriptions or interpretations of the situation, or even contradict one another. Thus, additional assumptions are needed to explain how readers b…
Inside Document Models
Text comprehension involves the ability to understand how texts relate to the situation they describe and to each other (i.e., a Document model). Research into Document models has emphasized the role of information sources in structuring readers’ mental models of situations. The present article reviews research on source comprehension and examines new hypotheses regarding source encoding during text comprehension. Two experiments examined college…
A Message From the Editors for the 2020 Conference Special Issue
The year 2020 will certainly be remembered as the year the citizens of the globe fought a deadly pandemic. Besides the horrors of illness and personal loss, travel was severely limited; economies w
Explanatory Modeling in Science Through Text-Based Investigation
This article reports the results of a randomized control trial of a semester-long intervention designed to promote ninth-grade science students’ use of text-based investigation to create explanatory models of biological phenomena. The main research question was whether the student participants in the intervention outperformed the students in the control classes, as assessed by several measures of comprehension and application of information to mo…
Readers’ Selective Recall of Source Features as a Function of Claim Discrepancy and Task Demands
In two experiments, undergraduate students read short texts containing two embedded sources that could either agree or disagree with each other. Participants’ memory for the sources’ identity (i.e., occupation) and features (i.e., the source’s access to knowledge and the source’s physical appearance) was examined as a function of the consistency of their assertions. In Experiment 1 (n = 64), sources were described with only one feature (knowledge…
Resolv
We introduce RESOLV, a theoretical model to account for readers' construction and management of goals during text comprehension and use. RESOLV focuses on readers' experience of their physical, social, and communicative context prior to actually engaging with texts. RESOLV assumes that readers construct two types of mental models prior to reading: The context model is a representation of the physical and social reading context, whereas the task m…
Thinking About Global Warming
We examined students' understanding of the causes of a scientific phenomenon from a multiple-document-inquiry unit. Students read several documents that each described causal factors that could be integrated to address the given writing task of explaining the causes of change in average global temperature. We manipulated whether the document set included a document that took a position on climate change policies and whether a reading/writing prom…
Disciplinary Literacies and Learning to Read for Understanding
This article presents a framework and methodology for designing learning goals targeted at what students need to know and be able to do in order to attain high levels of literacy and achievement in three disciplinary areas—literature, science, and history. For each discipline, a team of researchers, teachers, and specialists in that discipline engaged in conceptual meta-analysis of theory and research on the reading, reasoning, and inquiry practi…
Effect Logical Relatedness and Semantic Overlap on Argument Evaluation
In two studies we examined the extent to which skilled and less-skilled reasoners of arguments relied on relevance relations (semantic and logical relatedness) between claims and reasons when evaluating arguments. College students, selected as having high or low analytical reasoning skill, evaluated the quality of a set of two sentence arguments and rated the strength of their agreement with them. The arguments were structured to vary in their de…
Memory for Scientific Arguments and Their Sources
We investigated whether memory for scientific arguments and their sources were affected by the appropriateness of the claim–evidence relationship. Undergraduates read health articles in one of four conditions derived by crossing claim type (causal with definite qualifier, associative with tentative qualifier) and evidence type (experimental, correlational). This manipulation produced articles that overstated the results of a study and articles th…
Easy to Understand but Difficult to Decide
Well-educated laypeople tend to rely on their own ability to evaluate scientific claims when they obtain information from texts with high comprehensibility. The present study investigated whether controversial content reduces this facilitating effect of high text comprehensibility on readers' self-reliance and whether the influence of comprehensibility and controversiality is mediated by perceived epistemic topic complexity. Eighty-eight students…
Text-based Learning and Reasoning
History is both an academic discipline and a school subject. As a discipline, it fosters a systematic way of discovering and evaluating the events of the past. As a school subject, American history is a staple of middle grades and high school curricula in the United States. In higher education, it is part of the liberal arts education tradition. Its role in school learning provides a context for our approach to history as a topic of learning. In …
The Role of Epistemic Beliefs in the Comprehension of Multiple Expository Texts
In present-day knowledge societies, competent reading involves the integration of information from multiple sources into a coherent, meaningful representation of a topic, issue, or situation. This article reviews research and theory concerning the comprehension of multiple textual resources, focusing especially on linkages recently established between dimensions of epistemic beliefs and multiple-text comprehension. Moreover, a proposed model inco…
Trust Matters
Students obtain information from a variety of sources that vary with respect to their trustworthiness. And, while the trustworthiness of a source ought to influence the weight and position that the information in a document plays in students' overall comprehension of a topic, there is little empirical evidence of this relationship. In this study, the authors examine whether source evaluation is related to single or cross‐document comprehension. P…
The Effects of Hedges in Persuasive Arguments
Drawing together research on persuasion and text comprehension, two experiments test the effects of hedge placement (Experiment 1) and hedge type (Experiment 2) on attitudes, source evaluations, and perceptions of argument strength. Participants read an editorial in support of implementing comprehensive exams at their university. Experiment 1 shows that hedges placed on data statements (and not interpretation statements) lead to negative percepti…
I Agreed with What? Memory for Simple Argument Claims
Three experiments were conducted to examine how precisely readers recall the claims of arguments that they have just read. Participants read simple, 2-clause arguments such as, “The U.S. is right to intervene in other countries' affairs because local events can catastrophically impact the entire world.” Participants then evaluated each argument with respect to agreement or fit and recalled either the claim or the complete argument. The first 2 ex…
Improving Students' Ability to Identify and Use Source Information
Sourcing, contextualization, and corroboration are document-level literacy skills that experts routinely use when working with history documents. These are also skills that educators and curricula planners expect students to acquire. We examine high school and college students' current degree of proficiency with these skills and describe our development and evaluation of a computer-based tutoring system designed to teach these skills. We observed…
Trust Matters
Students obtain information from a variety of sources that vary with respect to their trustworthiness. And, while the trustworthiness of a source ought to influence the weight and position that the information in a document plays in students' overall comprehension of a topic, there is little empirical evidence of this relationship. In this study, the authors examine whether source evaluation is related to single or cross‐document comprehension. P…
I Agreed with What? Memory for Simple Argument Claims
Three experiments were conducted to examine how precisely readers recall the claims of arguments that they have just read. Participants read simple, 2-clause arguments such as, “The U.S. is right to intervene in other countries' affairs because local events can catastrophically impact the entire world.” Participants then evaluated each argument with respect to agreement or fit and recalled either the claim or the complete argument. The first 2 ex…
Readers’ Selective Recall of Source Features as a Function of Claim Discrepancy and Task Demands
In two experiments, undergraduate students read short texts containing two embedded sources that could either agree or disagree with each other. Participants’ memory for the sources’ identity (i.e., occupation) and features (i.e., the source’s access to knowledge and the source’s physical appearance) was examined as a function of the consistency of their assertions. In Experiment 1 (n = 64), sources were described with only one feature (knowledge…
The Effects of Hedges in Persuasive Arguments
Drawing together research on persuasion and text comprehension, two experiments test the effects of hedge placement (Experiment 1) and hedge type (Experiment 2) on attitudes, source evaluations, and perceptions of argument strength. Participants read an editorial in support of implementing comprehensive exams at their university. Experiment 1 shows that hedges placed on data statements (and not interpretation statements) lead to negative percepti…
Explanatory Modeling in Science Through Text-Based Investigation
This article reports the results of a randomized control trial of a semester-long intervention designed to promote ninth-grade science students’ use of text-based investigation to create explanatory models of biological phenomena. The main research question was whether the student participants in the intervention outperformed the students in the control classes, as assessed by several measures of comprehension and application of information to mo…
Reading Contexts, Goals, and Decisions
The spread of digital technology has prompted an increase in the amount of written text that gets produced and disseminated daily, together with a diversification of reading contexts and purposes. In this article, we propose that modern reading increasingly relies on readers’ ability to set up and manage their own reading goals and decisions. We outline our RESOLV theory of purposeful reading and we reflect on students’ preparedness for reading i…
Inside Document Models
Text comprehension involves the ability to understand how texts relate to the situation they describe and to each other (i.e., a Document model). Research into Document models has emphasized the role of information sources in structuring readers’ mental models of situations. The present article reviews research on source comprehension and examines new hypotheses regarding source encoding during text comprehension. Two experiments examined college…
Easy to Understand but Difficult to Decide
Well-educated laypeople tend to rely on their own ability to evaluate scientific claims when they obtain information from texts with high comprehensibility. The present study investigated whether controversial content reduces this facilitating effect of high text comprehensibility on readers' self-reliance and whether the influence of comprehensibility and controversiality is mediated by perceived epistemic topic complexity. Eighty-eight students…
Thinking About Global Warming
We examined students' understanding of the causes of a scientific phenomenon from a multiple-document-inquiry unit. Students read several documents that each described causal factors that could be integrated to address the given writing task of explaining the causes of change in average global temperature. We manipulated whether the document set included a document that took a position on climate change policies and whether a reading/writing prom…
Effect Logical Relatedness and Semantic Overlap on Argument Evaluation
In two studies we examined the extent to which skilled and less-skilled reasoners of arguments relied on relevance relations (semantic and logical relatedness) between claims and reasons when evaluating arguments. College students, selected as having high or low analytical reasoning skill, evaluated the quality of a set of two sentence arguments and rated the strength of their agreement with them. The arguments were structured to vary in their de…
Memory for Scientific Arguments and Their Sources
We investigated whether memory for scientific arguments and their sources were affected by the appropriateness of the claim–evidence relationship. Undergraduates read health articles in one of four conditions derived by crossing claim type (causal with definite qualifier, associative with tentative qualifier) and evidence type (experimental, correlational). This manipulation produced articles that overstated the results of a study and articles th…
Improving Students' Ability to Identify and Use Source Information
Sourcing, contextualization, and corroboration are document-level literacy skills that experts routinely use when working with history documents. These are also skills that educators and curricula planners expect students to acquire. We examine high school and college students' current degree of proficiency with these skills and describe our development and evaluation of a computer-based tutoring system designed to teach these skills. We observed…
I Agreed with What? Memory for Simple Argument Claims
Three experiments were conducted to examine how precisely readers recall the claims of arguments that they have just read. Participants read simple, 2-clause arguments such as, “The U.S. is right to intervene in other countries' affairs because local events can catastrophically impact the entire world.” Participants then evaluated each argument with respect to agreement or fit and recalled either the claim or the complete argument. The first 2 ex…
The Effects of Hedges in Persuasive Arguments
Drawing together research on persuasion and text comprehension, two experiments test the effects of hedge placement (Experiment 1) and hedge type (Experiment 2) on attitudes, source evaluations, and perceptions of argument strength. Participants read an editorial in support of implementing comprehensive exams at their university. Experiment 1 shows that hedges placed on data statements (and not interpretation statements) lead to negative percepti…
Trust Matters
Students obtain information from a variety of sources that vary with respect to their trustworthiness. And, while the trustworthiness of a source ought to influence the weight and position that the information in a document plays in students' overall comprehension of a topic, there is little empirical evidence of this relationship. In this study, the authors examine whether source evaluation is related to single or cross‐document comprehension. P…
The Role of Epistemic Beliefs in the Comprehension of Multiple Expository Texts
In present-day knowledge societies, competent reading involves the integration of information from multiple sources into a coherent, meaningful representation of a topic, issue, or situation. This article reviews research and theory concerning the comprehension of multiple textual resources, focusing especially on linkages recently established between dimensions of epistemic beliefs and multiple-text comprehension. Moreover, a proposed model inco…
Text-based Learning and Reasoning
History is both an academic discipline and a school subject. As a discipline, it fosters a systematic way of discovering and evaluating the events of the past. As a school subject, American history is a staple of middle grades and high school curricula in the United States. In higher education, it is part of the liberal arts education tradition. Its role in school learning provides a context for our approach to history as a topic of learning. In …
Easy to Understand but Difficult to Decide
Well-educated laypeople tend to rely on their own ability to evaluate scientific claims when they obtain information from texts with high comprehensibility. The present study investigated whether controversial content reduces this facilitating effect of high text comprehensibility on readers' self-reliance and whether the influence of comprehensibility and controversiality is mediated by perceived epistemic topic complexity. Eighty-eight students…
Memory for Scientific Arguments and Their Sources
We investigated whether memory for scientific arguments and their sources were affected by the appropriateness of the claim–evidence relationship. Undergraduates read health articles in one of four conditions derived by crossing claim type (causal with definite qualifier, associative with tentative qualifier) and evidence type (experimental, correlational). This manipulation produced articles that overstated the results of a study and articles th…
Disciplinary Literacies and Learning to Read for Understanding
This article presents a framework and methodology for designing learning goals targeted at what students need to know and be able to do in order to attain high levels of literacy and achievement in three disciplinary areas—literature, science, and history. For each discipline, a team of researchers, teachers, and specialists in that discipline engaged in conceptual meta-analysis of theory and research on the reading, reasoning, and inquiry practi…
Effect Logical Relatedness and Semantic Overlap on Argument Evaluation
In two studies we examined the extent to which skilled and less-skilled reasoners of arguments relied on relevance relations (semantic and logical relatedness) between claims and reasons when evaluating arguments. College students, selected as having high or low analytical reasoning skill, evaluated the quality of a set of two sentence arguments and rated the strength of their agreement with them. The arguments were structured to vary in their de…
Resolv
We introduce RESOLV, a theoretical model to account for readers' construction and management of goals during text comprehension and use. RESOLV focuses on readers' experience of their physical, social, and communicative context prior to actually engaging with texts. RESOLV assumes that readers construct two types of mental models prior to reading: The context model is a representation of the physical and social reading context, whereas the task m…
Thinking About Global Warming
We examined students' understanding of the causes of a scientific phenomenon from a multiple-document-inquiry unit. Students read several documents that each described causal factors that could be integrated to address the given writing task of explaining the causes of change in average global temperature. We manipulated whether the document set included a document that took a position on climate change policies and whether a reading/writing prom…
Readers’ Selective Recall of Source Features as a Function of Claim Discrepancy and Task Demands
In two experiments, undergraduate students read short texts containing two embedded sources that could either agree or disagree with each other. Participants’ memory for the sources’ identity (i.e., occupation) and features (i.e., the source’s access to knowledge and the source’s physical appearance) was examined as a function of the consistency of their assertions. In Experiment 1 (n = 64), sources were described with only one feature (knowledge…
Explanatory Modeling in Science Through Text-Based Investigation
This article reports the results of a randomized control trial of a semester-long intervention designed to promote ninth-grade science students’ use of text-based investigation to create explanatory models of biological phenomena. The main research question was whether the student participants in the intervention outperformed the students in the control classes, as assessed by several measures of comprehension and application of information to mo…
Do you know what you are reading for? Exploring the effects of a task model enhancement on fifth graders' purposeful reading
Background Drawing on theories of purposeful reading, this study explored task conditions that support fifth graders' selective reading of documents in order to answer questions. More specifically, we investigated whether promoting students' elaboration of their task model increases task performance. Methods Participants had to answer series of questions by searching documents for the relevant information. Half the participants received a task mo…
From simple agents to information sources
The study examined how readers integrate information from and about multiple information sources into a memory representation. In two experiments, college students read brief news reports containing two critical statements, each attributed to a source character. In half of the texts, the statements were consistent with each other, in the other half they were discrepant. Each story also featured a non-source character (who made no statement). The …
Building mental models from multiple texts
Text comprehension theories propose that readers try to achieve a coherent representation of the situation depicted in a text. When reading multiple texts on the same topic, however, achieving a coherent representation of a situation poses additional challenges. Different sources may offer inconsistent descriptions or interpretations of the situation, or even contradict one another. Thus, additional assumptions are needed to explain how readers b…
Inside Document Models
Text comprehension involves the ability to understand how texts relate to the situation they describe and to each other (i.e., a Document model). Research into Document models has emphasized the role of information sources in structuring readers’ mental models of situations. The present article reviews research on source comprehension and examines new hypotheses regarding source encoding during text comprehension. Two experiments examined college…
A Message From the Editors for the 2020 Conference Special Issue
The year 2020 will certainly be remembered as the year the citizens of the globe fought a deadly pandemic. Besides the horrors of illness and personal loss, travel was severely limited; economies w
Reading Contexts, Goals, and Decisions
The spread of digital technology has prompted an increase in the amount of written text that gets produced and disseminated daily, together with a diversification of reading contexts and purposes. In this article, we propose that modern reading increasingly relies on readers’ ability to set up and manage their own reading goals and decisions. We outline our RESOLV theory of purposeful reading and we reflect on students’ preparedness for reading i…
Reading for university or for myself? Effects of context and beliefs about science on college students’ document selection
International audience
Improving multiple document comprehension with a lesson about multi-causal explanations in science
Introduction to the special issue
Psychology (22 works) · Educational Strategies and Epistemologies (20 works) · Computer Science (18 works) · Linguistics (18 works) · Cognitive psychology (12 works) · Comprehension (11 works) · Education and Critical Thinking Development (10 works) · Artificial Intelligence (8 works) · Reading comprehension (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works)