The effects of purpose instructions and strategy-focused instructions on reading processes and products

In educational settings, students read for multiple purposes, such as preparing for an exam, practicing a new reading strategy, writing an essay, and more. Because reading is a goal-directed activity, providing students with task instructions can help them create goals for reading and develop a plan to meet these goals. In the current experiment, we investigated the effects of purpose instructions and strategy-focused instructions on cognitive processes during reading and learning from a single text. Participants were randomly assigned to one cell of a 2 × 2 factorial design. Participants in all four conditions provided typed constructed responses during reading and completed a comprehension and transfer test after reading. For purpose instructions, participants either received information about the post-reading assessment or were just asked to read (control). For strategy-focused instructions, participants received either self-explanation instructions or think-aloud instructions (control). We coded the quantity and quality of the cognitive processes in readers’ constructed responses. Self-explanation instructions promoted the quantity and quality of cognitive processes students used during reading. Also, purpose and self-explanation instructions interacted, which promoted the quality of cognitive processes and reading comprehension compared to purpose-only instructions or self-explanation-only instructions. These findings indicated that purpose instructions and self-explanation instructions differentially affected reading processes and reading outcomes. These results underscore that different task instructions have varying effects, which has important implications for theory and practice.