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What Research Tells Us: Multiple Texts

Chapter 5 opens by looking at the growth of computers in education and of online search technology. Today’s easy availability of online documents is profoundly reshaping the reading students are asked to do, diminishing traditional focus on single texts. Skills for searching online, scrutinizing sources, and synthesizing results are now emphasized in school curricula. One consequence has been a parallel focus on these skills in middle school and high school standardized testing. We examine research on students’ success in mastering these skills and consider how the emphasis on multiple online texts may be changing what we mean by “reading”. Less is known about students’ comparative ability to handle multiple print versus multiple digital documents, though we review some existing research. Our discussion reveals the relevance of document authenticity, distinctiveness, and physical senses in how we comprehend and interpret texts.