Ladislao Salmerón | Universitat de València (original) (raw)

Papers by Ladislao Salmerón

Background: Reading on the Internet requires specific skills (e.g., navigation), apart from compr... more Background: Reading on the Internet requires specific skills (e.g., navigation), apart from comprehension abilities, but there is no test in Spanish to assess these skills in adolescents. The goal of this study is to fill this gap with a test called WebLEC, inspired by PISA framework (OECD, 2009). Method: WebLEC was validated with secondary education students (n = 941). It includes 28 items of three types (access & retrieve, integrate & interpret, and reflect & evaluate) applied to four reading scenarios (e.g., web portal, search engines, Internet forums, and Wikipedia). WebLEC provides a general reading literacy index, plus two navigation indices. Results: The validity and reliability of WebLEC was confirmed, and a scale to diagnose reading literacy skills is provided. Conclusions: WebLEC assesses adolescents’ Internet reading literacy skills. Given the growing importance of the Internet in ordinary life and learning situations, assessing these skills is the first step in implementing instructional interventions to foster Internet reading.

Internet offers people with intellectual disabilities (ID) unique opportunities to access informa... more Internet offers people with intellectual disabilities (ID) unique opportunities to access information and to participate in society. But concerns have been raised about the potential risks they face when accessing the Internet (e.g. giving credit to false information, being exposed to manipulative content). As part of the current debate between positive risk-taking and overprotection, our study empirically tested the extent to which 43 adults with ID identified and selected topically relevant as well as trustworthy web pages while searching the Internet for several topics (e.g. Can social-networks use your pictures for advertisement?). Participants also justified their search decisions. Results revealed that while searching familiar topics (i.e. social networks), participants selected more relevant and trustworthy pages than irrelevant and less trustworthy ones. Searches of less familiar topics (i.e. daily health), were carried out randomly, that is, without applying an specific criterion. Results point to the importance of topic familiarity on people’s with ID performance on Internet searching tasks. This pattern of results suggests that, first, we should avoid overprotection when people with ID search for familiar topics and, second, they need more support when searching for information about less familiar topics.

With the increasing dominance of digital reading over paper reading, gaining understanding of the... more With the increasing dominance of digital reading over paper reading, gaining understanding of the effects of the medium on reading comprehension has become critical. However, results from research comparing learning outcomes across printed and digital media are mixed, making conclusions difficult to reach. In the current meta-analysis, we examined research in recent years (2000-2017), comparing the reading of comparable texts on paper and on digital devices. We included studies with between-participant (n = 38) and within-participant designs (n = 16) involving 171,055 participants. Both designs yielded the same advantage of paper over digital reading (Hedge's g =-.21; d c =-.21). Analyses revealed three significant moderators: (1) time frame: the paper-based reading advantage increased in time-constrained reading compared to self-paced reading; (2) text genre: the paper-based reading advantage was consistent across studies using informational texts, or a mix of informational and narrative texts, but not on those using only narrative texts; (3) publication year: the advantage of paper-based reading increased over the years. Theoretical and educational implications are discussed.

Journal of Educational Computing Research, 2018

During the last decade several studies have proposed and tested different instructional methods f... more During the last decade several studies have proposed and tested different instructional methods for teaching digital reading strategies to young students. In this study, we have tested the effectiveness of a program combining eye-movements modeling examples (EMME) and contrasting cases to instruct ninth grade students how to plan, evaluate and monitor their digital reading. EMMEs are videos that display a dot representing the eye-movements of a model and an oral transcription of her thoughts while answering a specific question in a hypertext. Students in the EMME condition obtain higher comprehension scores in a post-test performed one week after the instruction, as compared to a control group that have received a control instruction using written case examples. Students working with EMMEs also spend more time reading the main digital document, but they don’t differ in terms of visits and time to relevant and irrelevant pages. Our study suggests that EMMEs can be used to foster literacy strategy instruction.

Contemporary Educational Psychology, 2018

This study investigated the extent to which students’ sourcing and comprehension can be supported... more This study investigated the extent to which students’ sourcing and comprehension can be supported by the reading of real, as opposed to print-out versions of multiple documents. It was found that the reading of real rather than print-out versions of multiple documents on the issue of climate change increased students’ memory for source information and made them include more specific references to document sources in argument essays that they wrote about the issue. In turn, such increased sourcing in essays mediated the positive effect of reading real versus print-out versions of documents on students’ construction of coherent representations of the documents’ content information. Theoretical and instructional implications of the findings are discussed, and directions for future research are provided.

Learning and Individual Differences, 2018

Internet-based reading involves integration and evaluation of information from different sources ... more Internet-based reading involves integration and evaluation of information from different sources and different formats, but also requires fluent navigation skills for adequate comprehension. The effects of linguistic (word decoding and comprehension-based print reading) and non-cognitive factors (reading frequency and self-efficacy) have extensively been studied for print reading; we know very little about their role in Internet reading, which is our focus in this study. 558 students from grades 7 to 10 performed a set of comprehension-based Internet reading tasks on a computer, while their navigation and comprehension scores were recorded. They were also assessed on print reading literacy, word decoding, Internet reading frequency and self-efficacy. Multiple regression analyses suggest that navigation skills increase proportionally with grade level and that print reading literacy and comprehension-based Internet reading share common processes. Moreover, the positive effect of navigation efficiency on Internet comprehension increases in higher grade levels. Finally, reading frequency of the Internet for informational purposes predicts Internet comprehension scores, and self-efficacy predicts more persistent and quicker navigation.

Computers in Human Behavior, 2010

Reading and Writing, 2017

Social networks enable people with intellectual disabilities (ID) to participate actively in soci... more Social networks enable people with intellectual disabilities (ID) to participate actively in society and to promote their self-determination. However, concerns have been raised regarding the potential limitations of people with ID to deal with untrustworthy information sources on the Internet. In an experiment, we assessed how adult students with ID evaluated recommendations in Internet forums authored by either self-reported experts or by users under pseudonyms who supported their claim either with documentary sources or their personal experience. We compared the performances of students with ID to that of students of similar ages but higher educational levels (chronological age-matched control group) and to younger students with similar verbal mental age (verbal mental age-matched control group). Participants were asked to evaluate to what extent a fictitious user should follow particular recommendations given in a forum and to justify their evaluations by writing a message to the fictitious user. Students with ID, as opposed to the two control groups, recommended the forum advice to a higher extent regardless of authorship and evidence used, and they included in their messages to the fictitious user a higher number of opinions and information sources not present in the forum without linking them to the actual discussion. The pattern of results suggested that students with ID have a limited ability to evaluate recommendations in forums and that they do not necessarily present a delay in the development of these abilities, but rather an atypical development. Finally, we discussed the potential implications for teaching digital literacy to students with ID.

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2016

Universal Access in the Information Society, 2017

While Arabic users represent by far the fastest growing language population on the Internet, rese... more While Arabic users represent by far the fastest growing language population on the Internet, research about how the peculiarities of Arabic language may shape users’ web interactions is still scarce. The preferences of Arabic users for menu location in websites have been studied. Two competing arguments have been proposed regarding the best location of menus in websites: conventional design (navigation menu should be placed on that side where users expect it based on previous experience) and reading direction (navigation menu should be placed on that side where readers are used to start off reading, so that the navigation menu is likely to be attended first). In an experiment, twenty-five participants with Arabic as mother language (who also spoke English) were briefly presented with screenshots from websites presented in Arabic or English and with menus located either on the left or the right, and rated their perceived visual appeal, usability, and trustworthiness. Results showed that participants judged the Arabic websites more positive when menus were located in the right- rather than in the left-hand side. In contrast, no differences for menu location were observed for English websites. These results are discussed in light of the conventional design and reading direction hypothesis and with regard to their implications for the design of Arabic websites.

Infancia y Aprendizaje, 2015

Biological psychology, Jan 18, 2015

We examined whether the initial orienting, subsequent engagement, and overall allocation of atten... more We examined whether the initial orienting, subsequent engagement, and overall allocation of attention are determined exogenously (i.e. by the affective valence of the stimulus) or endogenously (i.e. by the participant's mood) in the manic, depressive and euthymic episodes of bipolar disorder (BD). Participants were asked to compare the affective valence of two pictures (happy/threatening/neutral [emotional] vs. neutral [control]) while their eye movements were recorded in a free-viewing task. Results revealed that the initial orienting was exogenously captured by emotional images relative to control images. Importantly, engagement and overall allocation were endogenously captured by threatening images relative to neutral images in BD patients, regardless of their episode-this effect did not occur in a group of healthy controls. The threat-related bias in BD, which occurs even at the early stages of information processing (i.e. attentional engagement), may reflect a vulnerability...

INTELIGENCIA ARTIFICIAL, 2002

Abstract It is important to asses the knowledge an user has about a system in order to perform an... more Abstract It is important to asses the knowledge an user has about a system in order to perform an usable system design. It is also necessary to know how the objects, users and concepts concerned on the task are represented in the user mental representation. These ...

Research in developmental disabilities, Jan 31, 2014

Along 2 experiments we tested the anaphoric pronoun resolution abilities of readers with intellec... more Along 2 experiments we tested the anaphoric pronoun resolution abilities of readers with intellectual disability in comparison with chronological and reading age-matched groups. In Experiment 1, the anaphor test of Elosúa, Carriedo, and García-Madruga (2009) confirmed that readers with intellectual disability (ID) are slower than control readers resolving clitic anaphoric pronouns, especially when the use of morphological cues (e.g. gender) is necessary. In order to test if the poor performance could be due to low levels of metacognitive skills during reading, an inconsistency detection task combined with eye tracking was designed in Experiment 2. Participants read short texts with an anaphoric pronoun in the fifth sentence, either morphologically (gender) consistent or not with the information provided in the second sentence. The scores in the anaphor comprehension questions presented after the text confirmed that readers with ID are affected by the gender inconsistency but they ar...

Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 2005

The Ergonomics Open Journal, 2010

ABSTRACT This paper is aimed at presenting Read&Answer, a tool that records reading times... more ABSTRACT This paper is aimed at presenting Read&Answer, a tool that records reading times, one of the main on-line methods employed in text processing research. Read&Answer allows the recording, analysis and interpretation of the learner processing in order to test specific hypotheses and explain final comprehension results. First, we will describe the tool, and then we will briefly explain some research studies using the tool. We will show how Read&Answer can be used in combination with another on-line method extensively employed in text processing research, i.e., verbal protocols, and we will also compare Read&Answer with eye movement tracking, a widely accepted on-line reading times technique.