Reading Comprehension

Supervising Faculty: Scott Fraundorf

Contact: sfraundo@pitt.edu

Area of Research: Cognitive

Description of Research: People often make decisions based on what they read. For example, if we want to eat healthy, we might read an article about what foods we should eat. But we've likely all also had the experience of being overconfident in our comprehension of a text. You might only discover that you didn't understand a text after you were tested on it. When people are overconfident in their comprehension of a text, they may make decisions that are counter to the advice of the text. We use behavioral/cognitive experiments and eye tracking technology to investigate how accurately both skilled and less-skilled readers recognize their level of text comprehension and how they adapt their reading strategies as a consequence of their perceived comprehension.

Duties of Students:

  • Help with designing experimental materials (editing texts, documenting text characteristics such as word frequency)
  • Implement experiment by helping set up the online interface for participants
  • Assist with recruiting and testing participants (following training)
  • Help code and analyze data from the studies
  • Read scientific papers from this area of research and discuss them in lab meetings.

Requirements:

Terms offered: Fall and Spring

Lab page: http://www.maple-lab.org