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,…

In university settings, writing argumentative essays from reading conflicting source texts is a common task for students. In performing this synthesis task, they must deal with conflicting claims about a controversial issue as they develop their own positions. Argumentative synthesis is characterized by writers' back-and-forth moves between…

Examines the strategies spontaneously used by Norwegian university law students as they tried to understand multiple expository texts as part of their normal reading and studying. Finds that students' strategic processing changed over time, with some of the changes associated with changes in students' perception of the nature of the reading task.…