How can we help students integrate information from multiple sources?

I miss the encyclopedia. For people "of a certain age" like me, there was a time when most school assignments only required that I find an entry in the encyclopedia, read it, and then write a summary of it. Maybe I'd be asked to add a sentence of my own "reaction" at the end. That was it. Ah, the days of "single document comprehension" assessments. So straightforward, I could do them while drinking a Yoo-Hoo.

Well, today, with access to the Internet and the proliferation of sources, most students are asked to move pretty quickly from single to multiple document comprehension. And that requires integrating information across documents, which is no small task. Doing so requires "deep" strategies like self-questioning and comparing and contrasting.

But, there's still a place for more "basic" strategies like rereading. At least, that's one message I took from McNamara et al.'s (2024) recent study. They randomly assigned adults to either reread or summarize five texts on sun exposure and radiation, and then asked them to write an integrative essay. They found the rereading group outperformed the summarization group. They also found, importantly, that the quality of the summarization predicted essay performance in the summary group.

So, what does all that mean? Should we go back to asking students to just reread rather than using "deep" strategies to learn from multiple documents? I don't think so, and I don't think the authors do, either. Instead, I think a "blended" approach is best. Students should read and reread until they have a basic understanding, and then they can begin using deep strategies like summarization.

But, the other key idea is that students must be taught how to summarize well. Ultimately, we can't just assume students to know how to use deep strategies, they need instruction and support to develop those skills. Finally, we need to expect that, when first encountering a new topic and multiple texts, they will likely use some many "surface" strategies, like rereading, until they begin to build their foundational understanding, just as the Model of Domain Learning would predict.

So, I'll admit it's better to teach students how to effectively integrate information from multiple texts than it is to just send them to the encyclopedia. But I still miss the Yoo-Hoo.