Is my understanding yours? A study of higher education students' reading for understanding and the effects of different texts

This study explores the cognitive and affective reactions of 25 higher degree students to a text reading task under conditions which were designed to induce thorough understanding. Each participant read one of four short texts selected to be interesting and demanding and not intended for study purposes. They then wrote responses to a set of questions about their reading before sharing them with another student for tape-recorded discussion of similarities and differences in their understandings. Their text was available to them throughout and all responses were anonymous. It was found that with reading processes associated in the literature with what has been termed a "deep" approach to studying text, understandings varied between readers both between and within texts. Discussion between students about their differences allayed anxiety about understanding but did not necessarily aid it further, and most students felt that more work on the text would be fruitful. Variation is discussed in terms of response to text genre, type and style. Implications for theory and practice in higher education are drawn. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.