The role of perspective on students’ use of multiple documents to solve an openended Task

McCrudden & Schraw (2007) show how students’ interaction with a text is mediated by the instructions they are presented with. Specifically, perspective instructions prompt readers to use background knowledge to evaluate text from an assigned point of view. Research on perspective in single texts has demonstrated that readers confer relevance on text segments that are consistent with the assigned perspective (Pichert & Anderson, 1977). This work has tested the effects of perspective when reading conflicting information from multiple documents to perform an open-ended task, as well as has studied if the trustworthiness of a source exerts any influence on students’ decision to use information from a particular document. Results indicate that students’ reading of multiple documents is influenced by perspective instructions, which, in turn, can help students be more discriminative when deciding between more and less trustworthy documents.