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Misconceptions or inaccurate ideas about Alzheimer’s disease (AD) can be found in college students from health-related careers. Refutation texts explicitly introduce inaccurate information, refute it, and introduce alternative, more accurate information. This study examined the role of refutation texts in revising misconceptions about AD in Ecuadorian Psychology and Nursing college students. Eighty undergraduate students completed a questionnaire about misconceptions on AD before and after reading eight texts in one of two conditions: refutation (texts that corrected a misconception following a refutational structure) or control (texts that corrected the misconception with no refutational structure). As a result, participants read the spillover sentence (next to the refutation) faster and improved performance on a misconceptions’ posttest questionnaire in the refutation compared to the control condition. These results highlight the effectiveness of refutation texts in promoting the revision of inaccurate ideas about AD in college students during reading and 1 week later.

La lectura digital competente involucra realizar evaluaciones sobre la confiabilidad de las fuentes de información. Se ha asociado el nivel educativo a estas habilidades, pero los estudios se han centrado en comparar a estudiantes de diferentes niveles educativos entre sí, omitiendo a los graduados. El objetivo de este trabajo fue describir y comparar el desempeño de estudiantes universitarios iniciales y graduados de educación superior en tareas de evaluación de confiabilidad de documentos, mediante un diseño ex post facto prospectivo. Para ello, 89 adultos completaron online cuatro tareas situadas de habilidades de uso de fuentes (evaluación y uso de sitios web de diferente calidad y relevancia), adaptadas de estudios previos para esta investigación, junto con un cuestionario de uso de internet. Los análisis inferenciales (modelos lineales generalizados) mostraron que, si bien los resultados variaron según tarea, los estudiantes tendieron a tener mejor desempeño en el uso de fuentes que los graduados. Asimismo, algunas habilidades de uso de internet autorreportadas (habilidades de navegación, cantidad de horas en internet por semana) se asociaron al uso de fuentes en dos de las tareas. Estos resultados podrían explicarse por variaciones entre los grupos en las creencias sobre el conocimiento o en las representaciones del contexto de las tareas. Este estudio aporta evidencia sobre la importancia de caracterizar las habilidades de lectura digital incluso en poblaciones que culminaron niveles educativos superiores. Digital reading literacy involves evaluating the trustworthiness of sources. The students’ educational level has been associated with these skills, but studies have focused on comparing students of different educational levels with each other, omitting graduates. This research aimed to describe and compare the performance of early college students and higher education graduates in document trustworthiness evaluation tasks, using an ex post facto prospective design. For this purpose, 89 adults completed four scenario-based sourcing tasks online (evaluation and use of websites of different quality and relevance), specifically adapted for this research from prior studies, and an Internet use habits questionnaire. The analyses (generalized linear models) revealed that, although results varied by task, students tended to perform better in sourcing than graduates. Also, some self-reported Internet use skills (navigation skills, hours spent on the internet per week) were associated with sourcing in two tasks. These results could be explained by between-group variations in epistemic beliefs or representations of task context. This study provides evidence of the importance of characterizing digital reading skills even in populations that have graduated from higher education.

We examined the contribution of Internet operational and navigation skills, previous knowledge, and working memory capacity to expository text comprehension as a lesson within an e-learning course. As different from previous studies in controlled settings; this study addressed students’ typical behavior in more ecological conditions. The first study tested self-reported Internet Skills Scale structure, reliability and concurrent validity, in a sample of 254 college students from a large Latin American public university. The second study addressed the contribution of self-reported Internet skills, previous domain knowledge, and working memory capacity to text comprehension in e-learning. Students ( n  = 125) read high or low previous knowledge expository science texts and answered questions about them, in an e-learning course specifically designed for research purposes, accessed remotely. They also completed working memory tests. Working memory and navigation were significantly associated with text comprehension: higher working memory, and lower scores in self-reported navigation behavior, led to better comprehension. These results have implications for instructional design and reading strategies interventions.

According to the documents model framework (Britt, Perfetti, Sandak, & Rouet, 1999 ), readers’ detection of contradictions within texts increases their integration of source–content links (i.e., who says what). This study examines whether conflict may also strengthen the relationship between the respective sources. In two experiments, participants read brief news reports containing two critical statements attributed to different sources. In half of the reports, the statements were consistent with each other, whereas in the other half they were discrepant. Participants were tested for source memory and source integration in an immediate item-recognition task (Experiment 1 ) and a cued recall task (Experiments 1 and 2 ). In both experiments, discrepancies increased readers’ memory for sources. We found that discrepant sources enhanced retrieval of the other source compared to consistent sources (using a delayed recall measure; Experiments 1 and 2 ). However, discrepant sources failed to prime the other source as evidenced in an online recognition measure (Experiment 1 ). We argue that discrepancies promoted the construction of links between sources, but that integration did not take place during reading.

Story events are a psychological cause of emotional reactions, which in turn, motivate subsequent actions. This study addresses the degree of specificity of readers' inferences about fictional characters' emotions. In Experiment 1 (off-line), participants read short stories and selected the emotional term that was more consistent with the protagonist's emotion. Results indicated that participants tended to favor the specific emotional word. In Experiment 2 (on-line), reading times were longer when a target sentence described the protagonist in an emotional state that differed in family from the adequate emotional state, but belonged to the same class and valence of emotions, but no differences were found between emotions belonging to the same family. Overall, these results indicate that emotional inferences are more specific than valence and class, but not specific enough to differentiate subtleties within a family of emotions.

La competencia lectora digital puede definirse como un conjunto de habilidades para acceder, navegar, integrar y evaluar la confiabilidad de la información en Internet, principalmente en formato escrito. El presente estudio tuvo por objetivo examinar la contribución de las funciones ejecutivas (inhibición, flexibilidad cognitiva y memoria de trabajo) al rendimiento en una prueba de evaluación de la competencia lectora digital en estudiantes universitarios. Ochenta y cinco estudiantes universitarios argentinos (56 de género femenino, edad promedio: 20.34 ± 4.6 años) completaron una prueba de competencia lectora digital y una batería computarizada de funcionamiento ejecutivo. Luego de controlar los puntajes de vocabulario y factores sociodemográficos, la flexibilidad cognitiva fue el principal predictor de la competencia lectora. En particular, se asoció al rendimiento en las tareas de búsqueda e integración de la información. La memoria visoespacial predijo los puntajes de búsqueda y la inhibición correlacionó positivamente con las tareas de evaluación de la confiabilidad de la información. Nuestros resultados indicaron: 1) una contribución general de la flexibilidad cognitiva a la competencia lectora digital, posiblemente reflejando la necesidad de alternar entre múltiples documentos y estrategias de lectura y navegación; 2) un vínculo específico entre la memoria de trabajo visoespacial y la búsqueda de información, lo que podría indicar la demanda de procesamiento espacial relacionada con la navegación de hipervínculos; y 3) un posible rol de la inhibición en la evaluación de documentos de la web, la cual podría contribuir a la supresión de información irrelevante.

Online reading for academic purposes is a complex and challenging activity that involves analysing task requirements, assessing information needs, accessing relevant contents, and evaluating the relevance and reliability of information given the task at hand. The present study implemented and tested an analytical approach to strategy training that combined a detailed, step-by-step presentation of each strategy with the integration of various strategies across modules and practice tasks. One hundred sixty-seven university students were assigned to either a treatment or a control condition. The training program was implemented as part of a digital literacy course. Instructors received background information and instructional materials prior to the beginning of the term. The intervention improved students’ performance on a set of search and evaluation tasks representative of the target skills, although to varying extent. The impact was higher for evaluation than for search skills, in terms of accuracy and quality of students’ justifications. The data provides initial evidence that an analytical approach may foster university students’ use of advanced reading strategies in the context of online reading. Implications for instruction and future research are discussed.

La disminución en el desempeño en tareas de memoria semántica observada en la Enfermedad de Alzheimer (EA) se vincula con la pérdida progresiva de los atributos que subyacen a la representación de la categoría. El trabajo examinó la afectación en tareas semánticas centradas en dos categorías de ‘seres vivientes’, dependiendo del tipo de relación semántica entre los nodos y del grado de deterioro asociado a la EA. Ciento ocho participantes voluntarios de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina (Edad M = 71 años, DE = 6; Escolaridad M =10 años, DE = 5) completaron una tarea de verificación de la veracidad de oraciones (verdadero-falso). La tarea evaluó tres tipos de relación semántica: taxonómica, parte-todo y evaluativa. La muestra se dividió en cuatro grupos, en función de su rendimiento cognitivo: controles (n = 27), deterioro cognitivo leve o DCL (n = 50), EA leve (n = 36) y EA moderada (n = 14). Los resultados mostraron desempeño disminuido en el procesamiento de las afirmaciones falsas y mayor afectación de la relación semántica parte-todo en los grupos con mayor severidad de la EA respecto del resto. Se observó, asimismo, una tendencia escalonada en el desempeño, con el grupo control mostrando el mejor desempeño, seguido por los grupos DCL y EA leve, seguidos por el grupo EA moderada, aunque no todos estos escalones alcanzaron diferencias significativas. Los resultados son interpretados a la luz del impacto que el curso de la EA tiene sobre las relaciones semánticas y el aprovechamiento de este conocimiento para el trabajo clínico.