Ellen Agnello, Disseration Defense
Thursday, March 9, 2023 at 10am EST
Please join us online at: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/6730987393
Title: Secondary Students’ Comprehension of Mathematical Informational Texts: An Exploration of the Effects of Mathematical Representations and Knowledge of them on Comprehension Outcomes
Abstract: Since the adoption of the Common Core State Standards in 2010, American schools have increasingly emphasized the teaching and reading of informational texts across the curriculum. Texts classified as informational differ from those classified as narrative in their purposes, characteristics, and the cognitive demands they place on readers’ meaning-making abilities. Studies within the realm of reading research have explored a variety of text features and reader attributes that may impact the comprehensibility of informational texts. Though many informational texts utilize mathematical representations, like fractions, percentages, and graphs displaying quantities, their mathematical nature and their readers’ mathematical knowledge have yet to be explored. This dissertation positions mathematical representations as an informational text characteristic and self-perceived knowledge of them as a reader attribute for the purpose of exploring a possible interaction between them and comprehension outcomes. In doing so, it seeks to answer two research questions: 1) Does the presence of mathematical representations impact students’ comprehension of informational texts?, and 2) Are reader attributes, including knowledge of mathematical representations, content knowledge, and numeracy self-efficacy correlated with comprehension of mathematical informational texts? To answer these questions, this study assessed the informational text comprehension of 148 ninth-grade English language arts students. All student-participants read two texts: a mathematical informational text and a non-mathematical informational text. After reading, student-participants answered a series of questions that probed different levels of mental representation for both texts. Evidence of student-participants’ self-perceived prior knowledge of the texts’ topics, self-perceived prior knowledge of mathematical representations utilized within the mathematical text, self-perceived prior knowledge of the text’s topics, and numeracy self-efficacy was also gathered through self-estimation items that participants answered before and after reading the texts. Dependent t-tests were performed to explore the hypothesized relationship between the presence of mathematical representations in informational text and students’ comprehension outcomes. Pearson correlation coefficients were calculated to determine the relationships between the reader attributes of interest and mathematical text comprehension. The results of these statistical analyses suggest that the presence of mathematical representations does impact comprehension outcomes, however; no significant relationship between the reader attributes of interest and comprehension outcomes was detected. While the differences between narrative and informational texts have been explored extensively, these findings also indicate that not all informational texts are the same. Different representational resources like numbers, words, and graphics may place different demands on readers’ abilities to comprehend. This finding corroborates a phenomenon that has been extensively studied in numerical cognition: the brain processes numbers differently than words and therefore different regions of the brain are responsible for mentally representing numbers and words. This study’s findings have implications for practitioners and researchers. They suggest that in addition to the informational text features that have been historically explored, there are others that may affect comprehension outcomes. They extend the well-accepted notion that informational and narrative texts are different by suggesting that even texts classified as informational may provide readers with different challenges based on the symbolic codes used. Finally, they beg the question, what reader attributes might increase or decrease the challenge of comprehending mathematical informational texts? This should be further explored through research.
For more information, contact: Hannah Dostal at hannah.dostal@uconn.edu