Exploring Adolescents’ Critical Reading of Socioscientific Topics Using Multimodal Texts

This qualitative within-individual case design study involved six adolescents (age 10–14 years) engaging in a think-aloud observational protocol to read two texts on climate change from contrasting viewpoints. The participants completed a prior knowledge assessment and survey of technology used to assess potential mediating factors. Survey and observational data are presented as participant profiles. Results illustrated the effect of participants’ background knowledge, emotional elicitation of text features, cognitive dissonance argument analysis due to the contrasting multimodal texts, and impact of visual images on participants’ comprehension. Our data analyses revealed that there is an interconnected and nuanced relationship amongst many text and individual factors when adolescents engage in critical reading of SSI multimodal texts. This research provides direction for future science education research that support learners in critical reading of complex socioscientific topics as presented in multimodal texts with adolescent learners.