Ambiguity and Textbook Reading Strategies: A Qualitative Exploration of Three College Readers’ Eye Movements

Although independent learning with complex course materials is a standard component of college coursework, students may encounter challenges in comprehending and interpreting the dense content often found in textbooks. We focus here on how readers resolve a specific aspect of this difficulty, what we term definitional ambiguity – terminology in text characterized by what readers perceive as incomplete, unclear, or contradictory information that allows for multiple plausible interpretations. We explore how college students dynamically respond to definitional ambiguity experienced during a specific textbook-reading event. We use a qualitative approach to understand the reading approaches of three college students, exploring interviews and eye-tracking scan paths. We find distinct strategies used to resolve definitional ambiguity, including structural mapping of where relevant information is found on a page of text; a focus on connecting content across different parts of the text; and a readiness to explore and utilize different aspects of the text. Our findings underscore the importance of working with students to move beyond passively scanning text and toward an active, connection-oriented approach that links the various parts of the text to resolve comprehension issues that can arise in textbook reading.