Multiple Document Comprehension: An Approach to Public Understanding of Science

Imagine Joanna, mother of a teenaged son, who wants to find out whether playing violent computer games will negatively affect her son’s personality. Or Lucy, a 15-year-old secondary student, who is preparing a presentation about DNA fingerprinting. Or imagine José, a college student, who is collaborating with a classmate to prepare a presentation summarizing research on climate change. Although the protagonists vary in age, educational background, and purpose, Joanna, Lucy, and José rely on multiple documents retrieved from the Internet and must understand scientific information contained within and across them. Their processes are characteristic of how individuals acquire knowledge in the digital age. Yet, there is public concern that many individuals lack the skills needed to derive meaning from the textual mélange they encounter online (Leu et al., 2009). Accordingly, major research projects have been initiated recently in a number of countries, specifically focused on identifying skills and devising instructional processes related to the comprehension of scientific information from various sources (e.g., Project READi: Reading, Evidence, and Argumentation in Disciplinary Instruction, www.projectreadi.org, in the United States; Special Priority Program on Science and the Public, www.scienceandthepublic.de, in Germany; Project on Multiple-Documents Literacy: Understanding, Assessing, and Improving Students’ Learning from Conflicting Information Sources, www.uv.uio.no, in Norway). This special issue brings together a sampling of some of the cutting-edge research related to these initiatives. The contributions to this issue reflect a diversity of approaches in that they investigate comprehension of multiple documents at different levels of cognitive development and examine both individual and collaborative reading scenarios. A recurring theme throughout the contributions is conflict, meaning that comprehending requires readers to handle partly inconsistent accounts of the same situation or phenomenon. In this sense, the research teams ask under what conditions readers of multiple documents notice conflicts (Stadtler, Scharrer, Brummernhenrich, & Bromme, this issue), how their prior beliefs determine what they draw from reading controversial information (Maier & Richter, this issue), to what extent readers of multiple documents pay attention to source information (Strømsø, Bråten, Britt, & Ferguson, this issuee), how primary school students can learn to evaluate multiple sources (Macedo-Rouet, Braasch, Britt, & Rouet, this issuee), and