The Growth Of Text Literacy In Engineering Undergraduates

The reading behaviors of experts in areas like physics have shown that experts in science domains are very active while reading—i.e., drawing from background knowledge, applying comprehension strategies, and responding to the author. Relatedly, the Perry model, which depicts students’ epistemic orientations—i.e., how they value and respond to knowledge—indicates that freshmen are typically dualists, expecting information to be either true or false, but by their senior years, students recognize the relativism in knowledge, and the role of discourse in establishing consensus. Two questions were researched in this study, using a questionnaire methodology: i) Do engineering students become more active and metacognitive readers between their freshman and senior years; ii) do engineering students become less “transmission” oriented and more “transaction” oriented in their beliefs about text? The results are considered in terms of their consistency with other available data about engineering students’ study behaviors, and in terms of implications for the design of undergraduate engineering curricula.