ABSTRACT
In our information society, learning from multiple documents has become a wide-spread way of accessing knowledge provided by others. The search for information in text documents is a multifaceted skill, which readers increasingly acquire from elementary grades to secondary education. A comprehensive depiction of the sequence of steps used when dealing with research tasks in multiple documents is provided by the cognitive process model MD-TRACE developed by Rouet and Britt. The deficit of spontaneous attention to sources is puzzling because in developmental psychology research, children as young as five years already have the insights that knowledge is unequally distributed and that their own qualification as a source of knowledge varies depending on the situation. The reported studies show that task instructions are powerful tools with which teachers can support the integration efforts of their students. Moreover, modifying task instructions are rather economic interventions which may be easily integrated into daily teaching practice.
