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1. Drawing on What Matters: Sketching Reduces Memory for Seductive Details.

   Jaeger, Allison J; Dawdanow, A; Shipley, T F. (November 2016, 57th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society)

   Drawing on What Matters: Sketching Reduces Memory for Seductive Details. ALLISON J. JAEGER, ANASTASIA DAWDANOW and THOMAS F. SHIPLEY, Temple University — Seductive details are interesting pieces of information in expository text that are non-essential to the target concepts and can result in reduced comprehension (Garner, Gillingham, & White, 1989). Previous work has unsuccessfully attempted to reduce the impact of seductive details through various manipulations. Research suggests sketching is beneficial for science learning and can improve learning from science text (Ainsworth et al., 2011). The current experiment tested whether a post-reading sketching task could reduce the negative impact of seductive details and facilitate learning from a geology text. Results indicated that the presence of seductive details reduced recall of target concepts compared to a plain text. While sketching did not lead to higher recall of target concepts compared to summarizing, those who sketched recalled fewer seductive details. This suggests that sketching may help to focus attention on more relevant information in expository text. Interactions with spatial skills will also be discussed. Email: Allison J. Jaeger, allison.jaeger@temple.edu 

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2. Keep it simple: streamlining book illustrations improves attention and comprehension in beginning readers

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-020-00073-5  

   Eng, Cassondra M.; Godwin, Karrie E.; Fisher, Anna V. (September 2020, npj Science of Learning)

   Abstract This study used eye-tracking to examine whether extraneous illustration details—a common design in beginning reader storybooks—promote attentional competition and hinder learning. The study used a within-subject design with first- and second-grade children. Children (n = 60) read a story in a commercially available Standard condition and in a Streamlined condition, in which extraneous illustrations were removed while an eye-tracker recorded children’s gaze shifts away from the text, fixations to extraneous illustrations, and fixations to relevant illustrations. Extraneous illustrations promoted attentional competition and hindered reading comprehension: children made more gaze shifts away from text in the Standard compared to the Streamlined condition, and reading comprehension was significantly higher in the Streamlined condition compared to the Standard condition. Importantly, fixations toward extraneous details accounted for the unique variance in reading comprehension controlling for reading proficiency and attending to relevant illustrations. Furthermore, a follow-up control experiment (n = 60) revealed that these effects did not solely stem from enhanced text saliency in the Streamlined condition and reproduced the finding of a negative relationship between fixations to extraneous details and reading comprehension. This study provides evidence that the design of reading materials can be optimized to promote literacy development in young children. 

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3. Book Design, Attention, and Reading Performance: Current Practices and Opportunities for Optimization

   Godwin, K.; Eng, C.; Murray, G.; Fisher, A.V. (July 2019, Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society)

   Becoming a proficient reader is a critical skill that supports future learning. Toward the end of the primary grades, reading becomes increasingly automatized, and children begin to transition from learning-to-read to reading-to-learn. Yet, the design of beginning reader books may be suboptimal for novice readers. Colorful illustrations that contain irrelevant information (i.e., seductive details) presented in close proximity to the text may increase attentional competition between these sources of information; thus, hampering decoding and reading comprehension. Study 1 examines this hypothesis by experimentally manipulating components of the book design (e.g., presence/absence of seductive details) and investigating its effect on attention and reading performance in first grade students. In Study 2, we conduct an analysis in which we identify common design features in books for beginning readers and examine the prevalence of design features that were fmmd to tax attention in Study 1 and in prior research. Collectively this work identifies an important opportunity in which instructional materials can be optimized to better support children as they learn-to-read. 

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4. Automatically Identifying the Quality of Developer Chats for Post Hoc Use

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3450503  

   Chatterjee, Preetha; Damevski, Kostadin; Kraft, Nicholas A.; Pollock, Lori (July 2021, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology)

   null (Ed.)

   Software engineers are crowdsourcing answers to their everyday challenges on Q&A forums (e.g., Stack Overflow) and more recently in public chat communities such as Slack, IRC, and Gitter. Many software-related chat conversations contain valuable expert knowledge that is useful for both mining to improve programming support tools and for readers who did not participate in the original chat conversations. However, most chat platforms and communities do not contain built-in quality indicators (e.g., accepted answers, vote counts). Therefore, it is difficult to identify conversations that contain useful information for mining or reading, i.e., conversations of post hoc quality. In this article, we investigate automatically detecting developer conversations of post hoc quality from public chat channels. We first describe an analysis of 400 developer conversations that indicate potential characteristics of post hoc quality, followed by a machine learning-based approach for automatically identifying conversations of post hoc quality. Our evaluation of 2,000 annotated Slack conversations in four programming communities (python, clojure, elm, and racket) indicates that our approach can achieve precision of 0.82, recall of 0.90, F-measure of 0.86, and MCC of 0.57. To our knowledge, this is the first automated technique for detecting developer conversations of post hoc quality. 

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5. Net.Create: Network Analysis in Collaborative Co-Construction of Historical Context in a Large Undergraduate Classroom

   https://doi.org/https://repository.isls.org//handle/1/6293  

   Craig, Kalani; Danish, Joshua; Humburg, Megan; Szostalo, Maksymilian; McCranie, Ann; Hmelo-Silver, Cindy (January 2020, The Interdisciplinarity of the Learning Sciences, 14th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) 2020)

   Gresalfi, M. and (Ed.)

   History educators in large-lecture humanities undergraduate classrooms struggle to support reading comprehension, defined as the ability to simultaneously read a complex text critically, understand the text’s details and context, and vet the text’s claims. Critical reading of historical texts in particular helps bridge the gap between seeing history as memorization-oriented and seeing it as an inquiry-oriented discipline that reconstructs narrative and context. Net.Create is an open-source, network-analysis software tool paired with activities that support intuitive creation and revision of a network data set and accompanying visualization, and through these representational practices, reading comprehension in humanities classrooms. Findings show that as students draw on details in a historical text to collaboratively construct a larger network, they begin to emphasize context reconstruction over memorization. 

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