Novice Rules for Assessing Importance in Scientific Texts
Abstract
This study complements research indicating that content-area novices judge the importance of what they read in texts on the basis of sentence type (e.g. whether sentences are definitions or statements). Subjects varying in expertise judged the importance of sentences in physics which were presented as definitions or as statements of fact. Definitions and statements were identical in substantive content. Those in the categories of expert and novice judged the variants as equal in importance. Beginning physics students, however, judged the definitions as more important. These results suggest that sentence form is a salient text feature for beginning-level students. Beginners lack the knowledge necessary to judge the importance of content directly, but they have developed general rules about what types of information are often important in physics. By contrast, sentence form is not relevant for people with no training in physics - - they have no expectations at all regarding what types of information should be important; and experts pay little attention to sentence form because they have rich content schemas which enable them to judge importance directly. These results have theoretical implications for understanding content schema development and also have practical implications for the writing of textbooks. Keywords: Text learning; Expert-novice differences.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 1986
- Accession Number
- ADA177676
Entities
People
- Diana Dee-lucas
- Jill H. Larkin
Organizations
- Carnegie Mellon University