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Alternate text types and student outcomes: an experiment comparing traditional textbooks and more epistemologically considerate texts

ABSTRACT Inscriptions and texts are central to the practice of science and determining how science ideas are presented in high school biology classrooms. Traditional textbooks have been criticised for their expository nature, their difficult lexical structure, and for their lack of evidence to support claims. Recent frameworks for science education in the United States emphasise the need for students to engage texts that better reflect the scientific enterprise. This study uses a randomised experiment to compare high school student outcomes – interest, comprehension, and learning – when reading traditional biology text accounts and when reading more epistemologically considerate (EC) accounts that provide developmentally appropriate narratives of scientific experiments, including data and evidence for claims made within the texts. Results indicate that students in the two conditions may not differ in their interest in or comprehension of the texts, but that students reading the more EC texts show some higher achievement on transfer tasks. Furthermore, students in the treatment condition show that when epistemic resources are made available within a text, they are more likely to attend to data and evidence and are less likely to rely on the authority of the text when determining the trustworthiness of claims.