Suzanne E. Wade

Effects of Importance and Interest on Recall of Biographical Text.

The purpose of this study was to investigate two characteristics of texts—structural importance and text-based interest—that affect what students remember from their reading. Two experiments were conducted. In the first, college students rated sentences in a biographical text for both interest and importance, which were found to be highly related. As a result, four categories of sentences were established: high importance/high interest (the main ideas), high importance/low interest (supporting details), low importance/high interest (seductive details), and low importance/low interest (common events in a persons life history that are unrelated to the main ideas). The second experiment examined the recall of an equivalent group of college students, either immediately after reading the passage or one week later. Interest was found to have a powerful effect on recall for both good and poorer readers. The two categories of information that were best remembered were seductive details and main ideas, both of which had been rated as interesting. Least well remembered were the details supporting the main ideas, which had been rated as important but uninteresting.

Research to Practice Online: Conditions That Foster Democracy, Community, and Critical Thinking in Computer-Mediated Discussions.

Abstract Although computer-mediated discussions (CMDs) have the potential to be ideal forums for fostering dialogue, research on listservs and in college composition classes has found that the discourse tends to be dominated by a few individuals, often men, and is sometimes abusive. In contrast, results of our study in a teacher education course revealed that both men and women used a range and a mix of discourse strategies. With a few exceptions, both men and women were inclusive, supportive, personalizing, receptive to others’ ideas, and attenuating. They were also willing to be critical and to challenge others’ assumptions, images, beliefs, and positions, which they usually prefaced with supportive and attenuating remarks. In addition, both men and women were equally likely to mock and exclude those who did not abide by the conventions of the group norms, although such comments were uncommon. Based on our own research and a review of the literature, we discuss what we learned and offer recommendations for instructors around four themes: planning, netiquette, the role of the instructor, and assessment.

Research on Importance and Interest: Implications for Curriculum Development and Future Research

Research has found that interest is related to attention, deeper processing, the use of effortful strategies, feelings of enjoyment, and learning. However, some strategies for creating interest in text materials may interfere with the learning of important information. In this paper, I describe results of a study that used qualitative verbal report measures to identify text characteristics that are most positively and most negatively associated with interest, as well as quantitative measures to investigate how those characteristics are related to learning. Results have implications for curriculum development by contributing to our understanding of how writers of informational text can make important information interesting. The paper concludes with suggestions for pedagogical practice and for future research that may further our understanding of interest and how it might be enhanced in classrooms.

Prospective Teachers’ Problem Solving in Online Peer-Led Dialogues

In this self-study of a secondary teacher education course, the authors investigated whether there was evidence of critically reflective problem solving on the part of prospective teachers who participated in a peer-led online discussion of a teaching case about English-language learners. They also examined what approaches to multicultural education the peer-led dialogues suggested. Using the tools of discourse analysis to analyze the dialogue, they found some evidence of reflective problem solving. However, few students engaged in critical reflection, which entails examining the sociopolitical consequences of solutions and promoting social change through community action projects. Furthermore, many responses reflected deficit theories, stereotypical thinking, and technical-rational problem solving. Interwoven with the analysis of the students’ discussion is a self-study dialogue reflecting on the instructor’s curriculum and pedagogy. The self-study addresses what the authors have learned about how teacher educators foster critically reflective problem solving regarding issues of language, culture, and race.

The Selective Attention Strategy and Prose Learning

For more than a century, educators and psychologists have sought to understand how readers learn and recall text information. Early models of the learning process relied on almost mechanical explanations for how prose material was learned and recalled. For example, Frase (1969) described ways in which inserted questions might “shape” reading behaviors to promote greater learning. Thus, the reader was seen as passive and without any real input into the learning process. More recently, cognitive psychologists such as Anderson (1970), Brown (1980), and Flavell (1979) have proposed that readers are really active, strategic participants in the learning situation. This recent approach has encouraged prose learning researchers to investigate the types of strategies that learners employ in different contexts, particularly as they attempt to learn and recall information from long, expository texts.

Engaging Students in Reading: Implications for Research and Practice

This issue of Educational Psychology Review represents a qualitatively different type of compilation. It consists of papers by leading researchers whose work over the years has focused on questions related to student interest and engagement. In this issue, each of these authors overviews their own findings and the theories and research on which they draw, to discuss the implications of their research for practice and future research. Student interest and engagement have consistently been found to be associated with or to influence various aspects of literacy, including: (a) situational interest, or the likelihood that students’ interest for text can be triggered (Hidi and Baird, 1986; Hidi and Berndorff, 1998), (b) student attention to important content (Garner et al., 1989; Wade, 1992; Wade et al., 1999), (c) student memory for concrete text (Sadoski et al., 2000), (d) student perceptions of text coherence (Schraw, 1998), (e) student understanding (Beck and McKeown, 1988), (f) students’ background knowledge (Alexander, 1997; Alexander and Jetton, 1996), (g) students’ depth of processing (Schiefele and Krapp, 1996), (h) individual differences in comprehension (Renninger et al., in press), and (i) the design of learning environments that engage readers (Gutherie and Cox, 1998). However, none of these findings answer all of the questions educators may have about student interest and engagement. For example, what should teachers do if students pay attention to information in a text that they consider interesting when it differs from that which is important to an assigned task? How can teachers engage students in learning the core curricula, when they differ so greatly in their individual interests? How can teachers help

The literacies of the 20th century: Stories of power and the power of stories in a hypertextual world

The authors review and comment on issues raised in Literacy in American Lives (Brandt, 2001) and Literate Lives in the Information Age (Selfe and Hawisher, 2004).