Novice strategies for processing scientific texts

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Abstract
Three studies examined text features used by novice scientists to determine what is important in scientific texts. Expert and novice physicists selected the 10 most important sentences from physics texts, rated the importance of text sentences, and wrote summaries of physics texts. These data were analyzed to determine (1) the degree to which information type (i.e., definitions, facts, equations, and elaborations) was used as an indicator of importance, (2) the extent to which novices agreed with experts on what was important, and (3) how information type interacted with passage structure (i.e., level in passage hierarchy) in determining importance judgments. Both experts and novices considered definitions to be more important than facts but novices applied this rule more strongly. Both groups considered information high in the passage hierarchy to be more important than lower level information, but hierarchical level had a greater effect on the perceived importance of definitions than facts.