The doctoral thesis is written within the field of educational psychology, and has examined issues related to task-oriented reading processes with multiple documents in upper-secondary school students. More specifically, the aim of the thesis has been to study what students attend to when they select documents in order to solve tasks concerning socio-scientific issues. This aim have been examined through the thesis’ three papers using mixed, quantitative and qualitative methods, respectively. First, in the mixed-methods study, it was found that evaluations of content relevance and author expertise were salient to students when they decided on the usefulness of the current documents. However, the importance of author expertise differed between the two topics used in the study, a difference seemingly related to individual differences in familiarity with the topics (qualitative findings). Second, in the quantitative study, the relationships between three cognitive and motivational-affective variables were investigated in order to illuminate how readers’ attitudes towards the current topics could be predicted. In the third and qualitative, interview study, the students demonstrated an ability to use knowledge about documents’ source features and content relevance when justifying their document selections, as well as their prior topic knowledge.
Jointly, the papers have provided an empirical contribution to readers’ purposeful interaction with complex and multiple documents by offering insight into document selection processes, individual differences in these selections, and readers’ justifications for their selective reading behavior. The importance of understanding the relation between what individuals bring to the reading task and how and what they read have been characterizing for the findings. The doctoral work has been conducted at the Department of Teacher Education and School Research and in affiliation with the research group TextDIM (Text Comprehension: Development, Instruction and Multiple Texts) at the Department of Education, University of Oslo.
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