Answering Questions from Oceanography Texts: Learner, Task and Text Characteristics.

Abstract

Seven college students enrolled in a college-level introductory oceanography course read and answered questions on two selections drawn from their textbook in the course. Using verbal protocol procedures, three nonnative English speakers and four native English speakers described what they were doing to answer the questions. Students also varied in level of expertise based on their backgrounds in related science courses. The questions varied in terms of their relationship to the text and the type of processing required to answer them. A model of question answering from academic texts is proposed and this model guided protocol analysis. Solution strategies were abstracted from the protocols and indicated predicted effects of question type on difficulty and on solution strategies. Differences between individuals were related to domain expertise and to language background. Keywords: Cognition; Learning from text; English as a second language (ESL); Question answering.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 15, 1987
Accession Number
ADA190122

Entities

People

  • Richard P. Duran
  • Susan R. Goldman

Organizations

  • University of California, Santa Barbara

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Human Systems
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Cognition
  • Cognitive Science
  • Computer Science
  • Education
  • Geography
  • Heat Energy
  • Heat Of Vaporization
  • Instructors
  • Language
  • Latent Heat
  • Linguistics
  • Military Research
  • New York
  • Psychology
  • Schools
  • Students
  • United States

Fields of Study

  • Education

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • STEM Education
  • Team-Based Human-Centered Cognitive Task Decision Making and Information Performance.