Examining adolescents’ strategic processing during online reading with a question-generating task

Abstract

Forty-three high school students participated in an online reading task to generate a critical question on a controversial topic. Participants’ concurrent verbal reports of strategy use (i.e., information location, meaning making, source evaluation, self-monitoring) and their reading outcome (i.e., the generated question) were evaluated with scoring rubrics. Path analysis indicated that strategic meaning making coordinated with self-monitoring and source evaluation positively influenced the quality of the generated questions, whereas information-locating strategies alone contributed little to the participants’ question generation. Further, source evaluation played a positive role when readers monitored and regulated their strategies for information location and meaning making. The findings on the interplay of metacognitive, critical, and intertextual strategies in online reading are discussed with regard to research and practice.