INTEGRATION AND ITS EFFECT ON ACQUIRING KNOWLEDGE ABOUT COMPETING SCIENTIFIC THEORIES FROM TEXT

Successful learning from scientific text depends upon a learner's abil ity to integrate successively encountered ideas in the text. High scho ol and university students read texts that presented competing theorie s for ongoing scientific problems (e.g., the gradualist vs. catastroph ic theories of dinosaur extinction) under two conditions: an integrate d-text format versus a separate-text format. The integrated-text forma t was designed to portray science as inquiry and offered each theory a s a possible solution to the scientific problem. The separate text pre sented the two theories successively in separate texts and made no men tion of their conflicting nature. In general, the integrated-text form at tended to facilitate performance on tests that measured integration of ideas rather than memory for discrete facts. The study showed that successful learning is also affected by learner characteristics, such as the maturity of the learner's epistemic views about knowledge and the capacity of the learner's working memory. The results suggest that integration processes contribute significantly to students' abilities to gain a deep understanding of science from written texts.