Dealing with conflicting information from multiple nonlinear texts: Effects of prior attitudes

Prior attitudes can bias how students process information in reading and writing tasks.Students with strong prior attitudes tended to move away from source texts in their essays.Students with strong prior attitudes took stances in their essays.Students with neutral attitudes wrote essays with more synthesis and neutral conclusions. This study investigated the effects of prior attitudes on how students deal with conflicting information in multiple nonlinear texts. Sixty-one Dutch 11th grade students read multiple texts on a controversial topic and wrote a short essay on it. These essays were scored on perspective taken and the origin of information included in them. Ordinal regression analysis showed that students with strong prior attitudes were significantly more likely to write essays that were biased towards their prior attitudes. Furthermore, multiple regression analyses revealed that students with strong attitudes took explicit stances and added large proportions of information not presented in the reading materials in their essays, whereas students with neutral attitudes wrote syntheses and borrowed more information from the materials. Overall, results show that prior attitudes can bias how students deal with conflicting information in an open-ended reading and writing task.

[1]  R. Nickerson.  Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises , 1998 .

[2]  Laura A. Brannon,et al.  The moderating role of attitude strength in selective exposure to information , 2007 .

[3]  Mark P. Zanna,et al.  Are there “His” and “Her” Types of Decisions? Exploring Gender Differences in the Confirmation Bias , 2011 .

[4]  J. Rouet,et al.  The Impact of Presentation Format, Task Assignment, and Prior Knowledge on Students' Comprehension of Multiple Online Documents , 2007 .

[5]  Mar Mateos,et al.  Reading and writing to learn in secondary education: online processing activity and written products in summarizing and synthesizing tasks , 2008 .

[6]  C. Kardash,et al.  The Effects of Goal Instructions and Text on the Generation of Counterarguments During Writing. , 2005 .

[7]  Natalie Jomini Stroud,et al.  Media Use and Political Predispositions: Revisiting the Concept of Selective Exposure , 2008 .

[8]  P. Fischer,et al.  Selective exposure and information quantity: how different information quantities moderate decision makers' preference for consistent and inconsistent information. , 2008, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[9]  Ina Wechsung,et al.  How to support learning from multiple hypertext sources , 2009, Behavior research methods.

[10]  Paul van den Broek,et al.  The Effects of Readers' Misconceptions on Comprehension of Scientific Text , 2005 .

[11]  Peter Fischer,et al.  Selective exposure to information: the impact of information limits , 2005 .

[12]  Lucia Mason,et al.  Prediction of students' argumentation skills about controversial topics by epistemological understanding , 2006 .

[13]  E. Nussbaum,et al.  Promoting Argument-Counterargument Integration in Students' Writing , 2007 .

[14]  Steven A. Stahl.  What Happens When Students Read Multiple Source Documents in History? Reading Research Report No. 45. , 1996 .

[15]  Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick,et al.  Reinforcement of the Political Self Through Selective Exposure to Political Messages , 2011 .

[16]  Warming trend , 1997 .

[17]  B. Tabachnick,et al.  Using Multivariate Statistics , 1983 .

[18]  M. Anne Britt,et al.  The Role of Epistemic Beliefs in the Comprehension of Multiple Expository Texts: Toward an Integrated Model , 2011 .

[19]  Lucia Mason,et al.  Role of epistemological understanding and interest in interpreting a controversy and in topic-specific belief change , 2004 .

[20]  M. A. Britt,et al.  Using multiple sources of evidence to reason about history. , 1996 .

[21]  Klaus Krippendorff,et al.  Answering the Call for a Standard Reliability Measure for Coding Data , 2007 .

[22]  Nicholas A. Valentino,et al.  Selective Exposure in the Internet Age: The Interaction between Anxiety and Information Utility , 2009 .

[23]  Matthew J. Lindberg,et al.  Feeling validated versus being correct: a meta-analysis of selective exposure to information. , 2009, Psychological bulletin.

[24]  Amy M. Shapiro,et al.  LEARNING FROM HYPERTEXT: RESEARCH ISSUES AND FINDINGS , 2004 .

[25]  Jürgen Buder,et al.  Reducing confirmation bias and evaluation bias: When are preference-inconsistent recommendations effective - and when not? , 2012, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[26]  M. Anne Britt,et al.  The locus of the myside bias in written argumentation , 2008 .

[27]  Yvonne Kammerer,et al.  The role of Internet-specific epistemic beliefs in laypersons' source evaluations and decisions during Web search on a medical issue , 2013, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[28]  C. Kardash,et al.  Effects of preexisiting beliefs, epistemological beliefs, and need for cognition on interpretation of controversial issues. , 1996 .

[29]  Walter Kintsch,et al.  Self-Regulation and Link Selection Strategies in Hypertext , 2010 .

[30]  Charles S. Taber,et al.  Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs , 2006 .

[31]  M. Anne Britt,et al.  Do students’ beliefs about knowledge and knowing predict their judgement of texts’ trustworthiness? , 2011 .

[32]  Saskia Brand-Gruwel,et al.  Reading on the World Wide Web: Dealing with conflicting information from multiple sources , 2011 .

[33]  M. A. Britt,et al.  Studying and Using Multiple Documents in History: Effects of Discipline Expertise , 1997 .

[34]  Jean-François Rouet,et al.  The Skills of Document Use: From Text Comprehension to Web-Based Learning , 2006 .

[35]  Patricia A. Alexander,et al.  Profiling Persuasion: The Role of Beliefs, Knowledge, and Interest in the Processing of Persuasive Texts That Vary by Argument Structure , 2001 .

[36]  L. Ross,et al.  Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence , 1979 .

[37]  W. Crano,et al.  Attitudes and persuasion. , 2006, Annual review of psychology.

[38]  Keiichi Kobayashi,et al.  Strategic Use of Multiple Texts for the Evaluation of Arguments , 2010 .

[39]  Peter W. Foltz,et al.  Comprehension, Coherence, and Strategies in Hypertext and Linear Text , 2012 .

[40]  Gale M. Sinatra,et al.  The "Warming Trend" in Conceptual Change Research: The Legacy of Paul R. Pintrich , 2005 .

[41]  Peter Fischer,et al.  A New Look at Selective-Exposure Effects , 2010 .

[42]  Jennifer Wiley,et al.  Constructing arguments from multiple sources: Tasks that promote understanding and not just memory for text. , 1999 .

[43]  Keiichi Kobayashi.  The influence of topic knowledge, external strategy use, and college experience on students' comprehension of controversial texts , 2009 .

[44]  J. Michael Spector,et al.  Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology, 3rd Edition , 2012 .

[45]  Mary Anne Britt,et al.  Implications of document-level literacy skills for Web site design , 2002, Behavior research methods, instruments, & computers : a journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc.

[46]  Z. Kunda,et al.  The case for motivated reasoning. , 1990, Psychological bulletin.

[47]  Eduardo Vidal-Abarca,et al.  Summary versus Argument Tasks when Working with Multiple Documents: Which Is Better for Whom?. , 2010 .

[48]  Marlene Schommer.  Effects of beliefs about the nature of knowledge on comprehension. , 1990 .

[49]  Sean Aday,et al.  Selective Attention to Online Political Information , 2008 .

[50]  Mar Mateos,et al.  Reading to write an argumentation: the role of epistemological, reading and writing beliefs , 2011 .

[51]  Saskia Brand-Gruwel,et al.  Solving information-based problems: Evaluating sources and information , 2011 .

[52]  Edward E. Smith,et al.  A disconfirmation bias in the evaluation of arguments. , 1996 .