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Is It the Medium or the Message? Structuring Complex News to Enhance Engagement and Situational Understanding by Nonexperts

University of Utah, Salt Lake City

An experimental design, theoretically motivated by cognitive models of text comprehension, investigates effects of structures in complex news on readers (undergraduate non-science majors) who have little or no expertise for the content (science and technology). Text from two New York Times stories were modified for a proposed explanatory structure building (ESB) model to enhance reader interest in and comprehension of the content. Dependent variables include self-reported situational interest and a deeper situational understanding of the text as measured by sorting tasks and inference generating questions. A between-subjects field experiment exposed participants (N = 235) to text on a Web page in either the traditional inverted pyramid or ESB structure. As predicted, when controlling for pretest levels of scientific literacy, the ESB news text significantly enhanced reader interest and understanding of the content, as compared to the original inverted pyramid news stories. Results are interpreted in the context of enhancing the public understanding of complex news issues.

Key Words: science communication • health and technology • interest • news discourse • news comprehension • situational understanding

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