The effects of textual environment on reading comprehension: Implications for searching as learning
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper reports on a study of digital reading that investigates the effects of different textual environments on information interaction and comprehension outcomes. While there is a large body of literature that compares print and digital reading, research that compares differently designed digital reading environments is limited. Such work can inform the design of information and search systems intended to support learning. This study investigated the effects of two design dimensions: Text Presentation (Plain Text vs In-Context) and Interactivity (availability of Reading Tools). Results show that the simplest textual environment (Plain Text presentation with no Interactivity) was associated with the highest comprehension outcomes, but that Interactivity mitigated the negative effects of texts presented In-Context. Both time spent reading and certain reading behaviours varied to some extent by condition and may be associated with comprehension; however, personal characteristics of the readers played little to no role in determining outcomes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it