Mecanismos de generación de preguntas sobre textos expositivos con contenido científicoidentificación de obstáculos y papel de las metas de lectura

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the cognitive mechanisms involved in the generation of information-seeking questions asked on expository science texts read in academic contexts. The analysis of these mechanisms is done in terms of a model of question generation built upon previous research results on question asking and text comprehension. The key components of the proposed model are the goals and the obstacles found by a reader who processes a particular text. Information-seeking questions asked on texts are conceived as requests for information needed to overcome an obstacle to achieve a certain reading goal. After advancing the model, the dissertation includes a taxonomy of questions based on the kinds of obstacles found by readers who try to build a mental representation of discourse at the situation model level. According to this, three main types of questions were distinguished: associative, explanatory and predictive. The three types of questions are directly related to the types of inferences that readers generate when building a situation model. Then, the reliability and sufficiency of the taxonomy were examined. The central part of the dissertation involves predictions, based on the model, that were tested by means of empirical studies. First, the influence of reading goals on information-seeking questions was examined. The results show that reading for understanding a science text describing natural phenomena leads to a different mental representation than reading the same text to solve an algorithmic problem. Therefore, different patterns of information-seeking questions appear in the two conditions also. More explanatory questions were consistently found in the understanding condition of two experiments, as well as very few prediction questions in any of the experimental conditions. Finally, the effect that a motivational variable associated to academic contexts has on quationing was studied. Goal orientation influences the way students approach academic tasks and, therefore, it should influence question asking also. The results of an experiment analyzing the influence of goal orientation on information-seeking questions showed that mastery-oriented students ask questions in agreement with reading tasks. In contrast, performance-oriented students build a less differentiated, generic mental representation so that their questions do not differ depending on reading tasks. In conclusion, the dissertation takes a step forward from the mainly descriptive studies on question asking by attempting to elucidate the causes of questioning.