Revista Electrónica de Investigación Educativa (May 2004)
A Way of Processing the Information in Scientific Textbooks and its Influence on Comprehension
Abstract
Students who can meet the demands of academic discourse develop cognitive and metacognitive skills with which to understand the information they get from reading scientific texts, and thus establish their learning. In this work, a group of university students were evaluated concerning their competencies and deficiencies in the reading comprehension of a fragment of a scientific text used in one of their courses. The results allowed us to assess the most frequent difficulties in processing information and in understanding what they read. The group was made up of a few students skilled in reading comprehension skills, plus several inexpert readers with little capacity to monitor and assess their own understanding.