From reading complehension to document literacy: learning to search for, evaluate and integrate information across texts

This paper discusses the skills required for students to be able to access, comprehend and use documents independently, both in print and online. We start with a simple example in order to illustrate the demands posed by document-based school tasks on students' reading literacy skills. We then propose a descriptive framework to broaden the construct of reading literacy so as to account for document processes, including search, evaluation and multiple-text integration. We review some studies illustrating the challenges of these processes for primary school students, and we discuss extant research investigating the effectiveness of instructional interventions.