Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Science texts frequently use comparisons to communicate concepts, based on research that has established comparison's benefits in learning. However, applying these findings to student learning relies on a critical premise yet to be examined—namely, that students recognize comparisons in their readings. The current work aims to examine (1) students' ability to recognize comparisons in science texts, and (2) whether this ability can be trained. In two experiments across two different institutions, college students were asked to mark all the comparisons in expository science texts, with some receiving instructions and practice on identifying comparisons. Without training, students missed many of the intended comparisons. However, targeted training reliably improved comparison detection. The findings showed that detecting comparisons is a bottleneck in learning from science texts, but that this ability can be improved with brief training.