Exploring the Challenges of Hyperreading for Adult Developmental Readers:Initial Findings73% of college age students use the internet more than the library to conduct research; 9% use the library more (Jones, 2003).

“The paradox of interactive media is that being a user-control medium the learner expects to have control, and yet the learner does not know enough to be given full control” (Laurillard , 1998, p. 231).

Welcome and Introductions

According to the Rand Reading Study Group we must “design and teach students to use flexible learning environments that customize the text, activity, and sociocultural context in relation to goals and individual learners’ needs and preferences” (Snow, 2001, p. 301).

Purpose: To present initial findings for a mixed-methods study exploring the how adult developmental readers approach a generative research task within an open internet environment.

Michelle AmosAdjunct Professor, Academic Foundations, Santa Fe CollegeAdjunct Professor, Education, Saint Leo UniversityDoctoral Candidate, Adult Learning and Leadership, Teachers College

Since I am still revising my discussion and conclusions, I welcome any insights or ideas you might have on my students’ enacted experiences.

The Context—LaGuardia Community College

Open-enrollment public institution in Long Island City, Queens, New York.

Majority of LGCC students are international students. In spring 2014, LGCC enrolled 19,752 students. 111 different native languages and 157 different home

countries. White students are 12% of the student body. 45% were born outside of the United States. Students from

South America constitute 21% of the student population, and students from Asia constitute 17% of the population.

78% of entering students in fall 2013 failed one or more of the placement exams. In the 2008-2009 graduating class, 58% of graduates began their coursework in a basic skills course.

What is hyperreading?

the complex mix of critical reading and information literacy used for selecting, reading, and synthesizing multiple online texts for a generative academic purpose (drawing from Burbules, 1998).

It is not: eReading Browsing Facebook

Prior Experience, Context, and Reading

“Comprehension occurs at the intersection of the reader, the text, and the activity, all within a distinct sociocultural setting” (Dalton and Proctor, 2008, p. 320).

The Hyperreading ProcessAmos Proposal 1

Hyperreading Stage (from Leu and Zawilinski, 2007, p. 2)

Reader Actions

Developing Important Questions

Analysis of prompt/assignment Keyword Search development

Locating Information Selection of pages from search results Selection of relevant hyperlinks

Critically Analyzing Information

Identifying authors, biases, and relevance of information

Synthesizing Information Integrating information from diverse sites Integrating information in diverse forms

Communicating Information

Generative tasks online or in print to repurpose information to fit prompt/assignment/reader needs

Experiential Learning Prior Knowledge Technology Content Skills and Strategies Organizing Structures Prior Experiences

and Life History

Rosenblatt’s Transactional Theory Stance Development (1978)

Sandberg’s Tasks of Branching Literacy (2011)

See also Kuiper, Volman, and Terwel (2005); Eschet-Alkali and Amichai-Hamburger (2004)

Comprehension occurs at the intersection of the reader, the text, and the activity, all within a distinct sociocultural setting. (Dalton and Proctor, 2008, p. 320)

Research Design

86 students agreed to participate from four sections of Essentials of Reading II (three instructors)

Standard Measures: Department Pretest and Department Posttest

Additional Measures: Survey (50 participants) Generative Task (64 participants) Interview (12 participants)

Question One

How do adult developmental students describe and enact the process of hyperreading? How do students express metacognitive

awareness of navigational choices? What influences students’ branching

literacy? In what ways does prior strategy

knowledge impact student interaction with hyperreading tasks?

Question One—Findings

Sub-Question One: How do Students Express Metacognitive Awareness of Navigational Choices? Goal-Setting Statements Task Completion Search Engine Preference Keywords

Goal-Setting Statements

TT: Some people use it to abuse; some people use that for studies, but I prefer to learn something new, something interesting from the internet. PR: I am not sure of how – I mean, how much do you think a student is successful? If for me, if a student gets information that they want… 

Goal- Setting StatementsThe Research

Thus, teaching for choice and monitoring of goal accomplishment seems critically important for scaffolded digital reading and new literacies (Dalton and Proctor, 2008, p. 319).

• Prior Experience matters. Users with more search experience plan in their searching behavior while novices hardly are driven by what they see on screen at any given moment in time (Navarro-Prieto, Scaife, and Rogers, 1999).

Task Completion

JR: What I do is, I research like I did this with Bing, Google and try to like read four different pages and that’s where—mostly I go to four, more than that I don’t really go. But with four pages to me it’s enough to know what is looking for, trying to see if this page agrees with this or close to this or close to this. If it’s everything kind of close so that means, “Okay, I guess I know it’s what I’m looking for.” 

AL: Maybe I feel my feeling. INTERVIEWER: What feeling?AL: Like maybe the information answered my question. I know how to do the homework or something. AL: Maybe compare the information and then choose the best one.INTERVIEWER: How do you know which one is best?AL: Feeling. 

Search Engines/Keywords

EP: I like to use, I don’t know- I will usually go to Google. The first thing I will do is Google, I type in what the question is asking me.

 TN: Firstly, I go through the meanings like “manned”, “spaceflight” is simple but in case like “manned”. And then I start with finding “manned spaceflight fund”. Forget the United States of America and just going to that and just putting in United States government, “views on spaceflight”, like that. 

 JC: Oh yeah, I think to grab the keywords is the most important fact that students have to remember. It’s really helpful. If they cannot grab the keywords, they cannot find the information online .

Keywords—The Research

Sox and Rubenstein-Avila (2009) Provide simple, direct, step-by-step

instructions that avoid idiomatic expressions and phrasal verbs: graphic organizers to guide work efforts and organize information; multimedia features that are directly related to content; a brief description of linked websites; bilingual dictionaries; and definitions of key concepts.

Question Two—Findings

Sub-Question Two: What influences students’ branching literacy? Search Results Hyperlink Selection

Search Results

JD: I pretty much like, clicking the first three and they give me, it doesn’t satisfy what I’m looking for and then skip, go to the next one.

MG: I read the title, the bigger words. Or sometimes they put the first sentences, and if it says something more specific, what I'm trying to look for, I choose that. 

INTERVIEWER: Oh, at the top of the page.PR: Uh-huh. People mostly click and it might…maybe this mean I can believe that information, because most people click on it.

NT: Well, I try to go to...I think like you could go to Government sites where if it’s say something related to the Government then that’s the best website to go, and you get a... you get the right information so... 

Searching—The Research

Students look for actual sentences on the screen that contained the answer to their task (Fidel, 1999).

Students try to find a concrete answer instead of collecting information from which they could deduce an answer themselves (Bilal, 2001).

All results of a search engine are qualitatively good and a Web site with a great deal of text must be good (Lorenzen, 2001).

Hyperlink Selection

EP: Because let’s say like pictures do attract me because you know, you could tell a lot by a picture.

JR: What it makes me think usually to when it appears like this is I follow like this and if I follow another link what it makes me think is like maybe the next link is going to tell me to follow another link and another link. 

INTERVIEWER: So you don’t want to get too far? JR: Exactly. I’d rather to go to straight see what I

get. 

Question One—Findings

Sub-Question Three: In what ways does prior strategy knowledge impact student interaction with hyperreading tasks? Prior Educational Technology Experience Prior Academic Strategies Social Support Systems Technologies Support Strategies Video to Build Background Knowledge Wikipedia Rule-Following versus Strategy Use

Prior Educational Technology Experience

TN: We had computers, but it was so old. They didn’t even work. They were a bunch of computers not working. It was a real sorry state.

NT: High school experience... it is totally different than you know the technology at that time. We actually had no access to computer or Internet. I finished high school in Romania.

AL: My high school experience is in China. In China we don’t use computers so much like here. We don’t do anything like…We don’t use much about the computers

Social Support Systems

JC: Yeah, I would discuss with my classmate what the topic means, because I totally messed up with the topic…They use the man instead of the female attendant in the flight. So then I asked my classmate what the heck is that question. I was so confused of what is the topic.

 JR: Which was Kingsborough College but I didn’t feel familiar with the students and with the staff all the way down there so I came here. I’ve been here before taking other courses, and I see how I feel familiar with every people here. So that’s why I chose to come to LaGuardia to start with my career. 

Technology Support Strategies

Dictionaries Thesauri Translators Video

Technology Support—The Research

“Most vocabulary supports require strategic knowledge about how things work on the Internet, and specifically, knowledge of tools and social resources which are in a state of flux and change. This type of knowledge is typically not taught in classrooms, and, in fact, teachers may have limited experience using these tools themselves” (Dalton and Proctor, 2008, p. 312).

Question Two

What, if any, connection is there between non-academic technology experience and hyperreading? How does previous experience with

technology affect readers’ approach to hyperreading tasks?

How does reader stance—aesthetic or efferent, as defined by Rosenblatt (1978)—impact hyperreading navigation?

Question Two—Findings

Sub-question one: How does previous experience with technology affect readers’ approach to hyperreading tasks? Cell Phone Usage

Search Edit Home language use Social Media Translators/Dictionaries

Question Two—Findings

Sub-question two: How does reader stance—aesthetic or efferent, as defined by Rosenblatt (1978)—impact hyperreading navigation? Efferent Stance Aesthetic Stance Conflict between Reader Stances Interference of Stances Separation by Purpose Reading Preference eReading Advantages Print Advantages Correlation between Stances and Achievement

Stance

The attitude that a reader brings to the reading task: Transactional Theory of Reading: aesthetic or

efferent stance (Rosenblatt, 1978, drawing from Dewey and Kolb)

Deep attention is essential for coping with complex phenomena… hyper attention is useful for its flexibility in switching between different information streams, its quick grasp of gist of material, and its ability to move rapidly among and between different kinds of text (Hayles, 2010).

Survey ResultsTask Percent Participating

in last weekPercent of these in English

In Another Language

In Both

EfferentWord Games 42.9 61.9 4.8 33.3News Reading 83.7 53.7 7.3 39.0School Research 90.0 75.6 2.2 22.2AestheticBlog Posting 51.0 52.0 4.0 44.0Product Research 83.7 53.7 7.3 39.0Personal Research 92.0 58.7 8.7 32.6Email 93.8 42.2 0 57.8Social Media 87.8 46.5 7.0 46.5Online Video 70.0 42.9 0 57.1Streamed Video 84.0 45.2 7.1 47.6Shared Photos 68.0 29.4 0 70.6Video Chat 80.0 17.5 15 67.5Multiplayer Game 44.0 63.6 0 36.4

Stance—The ResearchThe Research

At most colleges within the US, students’ use of technology for nonacademic reasons far outweigh their uses for academic reasons. (Wilber, 2008)

There is a “double life in terms of literacy practices and values” –A discrepancy between the literacy and technology practices required of college students for academic purposes in formal-education contexts, and the technology practices these same students pursue as part of their own interests and in their own time (Hawisher and Selfe, 2004, p. 661).

Conflict Between Reader StancesCF: Yeah. Like because I'm easily distracted. Sometimes it's like a little hard. Especially like working on computer at home. Reading off a book, I know I'll stay focussed because I'll turn off my phone, turn off the laptop and everything. If I'm doing, working in something on the computer, I'm bound to get curious and check my Facebook or email.

JR: Okay, I liked it, but at the end I had to research everything and kind of hated the entire book so I was like, “This is how it ends, this is the story.”

PR: I use Facebook to see news also. For example, in my country – yeah, to see news and some – how do you say, some secret video that – you know in my country now, they get into problem like political problems. From news, they didn’t have to say they block people from news. Yeah, two weeks ago, there was – how do you say, there was curfew. People in my country can’t watch television and other times they have to stay in the…

Separation by Purpose

AL: My phone just for Facebook, to chat, to talk to friends. The computer I just use for study and watch TV.

CF: Yeah, I like to read. But it's cool to do it, like a computer online, like I said when I'm learning stuff, sometimes I'll use the computer, but if I'm reading a personal book, for my own personal reason, I'll read a book because it's easier.

JR: About reading, I do both, either Spanish or English. But speaking is different because I would say I call my mum three to four times a week and I usually talk to her--

eReading Advantages

JD: Like when you’re reading passages, it’s all like pure text. There’s no images or anything there at all. Sometimes it gets boring, so on the internet, when you read on new current events, there’s a picture, “What’s going on?” Like conflict in Russia, you’ll see a picture or so. It kind of gives you an end to the story, the whole details.JD: Yeah, it is based on the images that you saw. Compared to the reading passage, “Ahh, this blablablabla.” It’s like…

EP: I prefer reading online than books.EP: I guess the light; it does not put me to sleep because if you have a book just goes like...EP: You have a light; you just got to stand up, you know?

Print Advantages

EP: They ask for it, and I like to highlight it what I use. And when I use the research paper, I always tie it back because it’s in my mine, it’s the research, so I usually tie back like all the research said, according to the research, this is stated…

PR: First of all, because of my language. When I read through the computers, I cannot mark some vocabulary and actually, professor makes me like to look up the vocabulary like from the paper to the dictionary. So it is easier for me to read on the paper where I can underline some main ideas.

Correlation Between Stances and Achievement

Moderate 0.447313 Correlation between academic and social use

Weak 0.370038 Correlation between social use and pretest score

Weak 0.255719 Correlation between average tech use and reading score

Weak 0.229506 Correlation between academic use and pretest score

Weak 0.222073 Correlation between #high use devices and reading score

Minimal 0.209322 Correlation between social use and reading score

Minimal 0.200781 Correlation between academic use and posttest summary score

Minimal -0.20509 Correlation between #high use devices and pretest summary score

Weak -0.2331 Correlation between average tech use and pretest summary score

Question Three

What relationship exists among hyperreading choices, metacognitive awareness of these decisions, and generative writing product quality?

Correlation of Reading Tasks and Writing Subset Scores

Writing Process Language Background Influence of Limited English Input on

Acquisition Self-Deprecation

Correlation of Reading Tasks and Writing Subset Scores

     

Strong 0.750021 Correlation between writing and online total

Moderate 0.413472 Correlation between posttest and writing online

Weak 0.391305 Correlation between posttest summary and writing online

Weak 0.368869 Correlation reading online and writing online

Minimal 0.088551 Correlation between pretest and writing online

Minimal 0.027396 Correlation between pretest summary and writing online

Writing Process

TT: I don’t like to copy. I want to write what I know…I keep in my mind and then start to write…I start to write step by step in my note or white paper. Next or last thing of the thing I see maybe the- if I see that everywhere is the same, same concept or same thing…For me, first you look, don’t copy from directly and second of all, you keep your idea from all of the links in your mind, and if you want to copy, don’t copy the sentences or something just put- okay number one, this is important; number two, this is important; number three, this is important. Write it, then think about this and then again if you need to look at the site, you look up but don’t copy, don’t cheat. Just write yourself whatever you understand.

JC: On a piece of sheet…So we cannot copy from a content, from a website. We were in trouble if you do that in college…But you can paraphrase it…I was grabbing the keywords and my own words to make my own sentence.

Influence of Limited English Input on Acquisition

AL: Yes. But mostly I talk on Facebook (in Mandarin). I don’t have a lot of Chinese friends in here. And I have a job, so I talk in English with my job…It’s good you can practice English when you talk to people.

TT: Yes, from you know, my native language, here we can buy the newspaper, magazine, a book, everything; I learn, I read it.

JR: Exactly, that is my culture. Because I don’t want when I go back there, and I wouldn’t be able to talk to them because most of my family they don’t really speak Spanish so I need to communicate with them in my dialect. So that’s the thing, it keeps me doing this.

PR: For me, English is my first problemHS: So I struggled, “Oh, how can I explain this in English?”TT: My English is not so good, I'm telling you.

Question Four

What correlation, if any, exists between measures of student reading comprehension and student achievement in an open-environment hyperreading task?

Not much…   

0.191155 correlation between posttest summary and online

0.180382 Correlation between pretest and reading online

0.165798 correlation between posttest and online total

0.0685 correlation between pretest and online total

0.011547 Correlation between pretest summary and reading online

0.009975 Correlation between posttest summary and reading online

-0.04323 Correlation between posttest and reading online

-0.06949 correlation between pretest summary and online

Final Thoughts

The findings of research emphasize the need to teach students how to critically assess the reliability or value of the information they find on the Web by understanding not only its textual but also its nontextual features such as images, links, and interactivity. (Burbules, 1998; Burbules & Callister, 2000)

“It’s not just point and click. It’s point, read, think, and click” (Tapscott, 1998, p. 63).

Questions and COMMENTS!

Questions about the research?

Interpretations of the findings?

Things you think I should include in my discussion?

I can also be reached at mla2135@tc.columbia.edu