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T. R. Girill Society for Technical Communication/Lawrence Livermore Natl. Lab. (retired) [email protected]
Technical Writing: Highlighting as Post-Publication Text Engineering
Highlighting (nonfiction) text as one reads is a common self- scaffolding technique to improve text usefulness, compatible with (although never explicitly mentioned in) the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for English Language Arts. Successful highlighting, however, is harder than it looks. The process involves not only overt moves (marking the text), but invisible ones (selecting, evaluating, and prioritizing content). A recent comparative analysis of three dozen empirical studies of highlighting reveals why K-12 student writers need the help of cognitive apprenticeship to maximize the benefits that they can derive from highlighting text.
The Potential Benefits
The preface (for teachers and parents) of CCSS spells out the intellectual goals to which self-scaffolding, such as highlighting, is especially relevant:
...in grades 6-12...the standards in science and technical subjects ensure that students can independently build knowledge in these disciplines through reading and writing... (www.corestandards.org, "Key shifts in English Language Arts")
To highlight effectively as they encounter a new (STEM) text, a reader must be able to notice: * important, useful technical terms and distinctions, * key steps in a sequence or process, observed or performed, and * milestones or forks in textual logic ("in addition, by contrast, furthermore, instead, however"). Empirical studies show that reliably noticing the right text features to usefully highlight calls for both chronological maturity and coached attention.
Highlighting Pitfalls
Early in 2022, Hector Ponce, Richard Mayer, and Ester Mendez undertook a comprehensive meta-analysis of text highlighting studies to see what trends empirical research had uncovered ["Effects of learner-generated highlighting..," Educational Psychology Review, January 2022, doi: 10.1007/s10648-021- 09654-1]. They compared the results of 36 studies of highlighting performance published between 1938 and 2019, in which the experimental subjects were high-school or college students [p. 1].
Ponce, Mayer, and Mendez found two consistent, well-supported results from their broad research review (p.1):
1. Highlighting done by readers/learners spontaneously as they worked through a text... A. improved performance on memory tests but NOT on comprehension tests, and B. improved performance for college students but NOT for younger, high-school students.
2. Highlighting provided to readers/learners, pre-installed by an instructor in a text, however, A. improved reader performance on BOTH comprehension and memory tests, and B. helped high-school students as well as older, college students.
The likely explanation for these differences: "high-quality" instructor-provided highlighting "overcomes the problem that inexperienced students are likely to select the wrong material" to highlight, thus actually confusing or misleading themselves later when they rely on self-highlights for study, review, or text analysis (p. 6).
Ponce, Mayer, and Mendez connect this persistent pattern to the general role of cognitive load in learning:
...when learners receive high-quality highlighting, learner's selecting processes are conducted with high efficiency, and therefore cognitive capacity is available for the higher-level processes of organizing and integrating [the technical text that they read or write] (p. 32).
How Cognitive Apprenticeship Helps
So how can relatively younger and inexperienced readers/writers gain the full cognitive-load benefits of text highlighting? As noted above, highlighting is only visible as a marking process, not as a decision/organizing process. You can help students notice and then practice the invisible aspects of highlighting by sharing not just your results (marked up text), but also by announcing and modeling your (otherwise) invisible intellectual moves as you make them on a sample of STEM text in front of student readers.
This provides the same kind of cognitive apprenticeship opportunity that drafting an abstract (for a longer text) in front of students with your own running commentary does--the normally hidden expert process becomes explicit, so novice watchers can internalize and then practice it on their own. As they try out the decisions and selections that they see you perform/announce during such public highlighting, they gradually become more empowered, effective self-highlighters themselves. This enables stude
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