Reasoning beyond history: examining students’ strategy use when completing a multiple text task addressing a controversial topic in education

Given prior work identifying sourcing, corroboration, and contextualization as key strategies needed to learn from multiple texts, this study examines students’ multiple text processing and written response composition under three different heuristic conditions. In particular, students were asked to engage in sourcing, corroboration, or contextualization while completing a multiple text task. Then, log data of text access, students’ notes, and written responses were analyzed across task conditions. Moreover, each sentence included in students’ written responses was linked to information in notes and in the library texts provided. Results indicate that students directed to engage in sourcing both accessed more document information and included more of such information in their notes. More generally, students’ response composition was found to be reductive in nature, with students filtering information from library texts into their notes and into the written responses that they composed; at the same time, cross-textual integration was found to be limited.