Although illiteracy has been in constant decline over the last decades, there
are too many reports about people having problems to identify the main ideas
contained in texts they read. Reading comprehension is essential for students,
because it is a predictor of their academic or professional success.
Researchers have developed computer supported learning activities for
supporting students develop their reading comprehension skills with varying
degrees of success. One of the various advantages of having students work on
electronic documents is that computers can help teachers monitor students'
work. One of the problems of these systems is poor usability due to
sophisticated humancomputer interaction paradigms emulating activities students
perform in traditional learning activities for improving reading comprehension
with pen and paper. In this paper we report on a research which implements a
learning activity based on answers with multiple choice similar to a
questionnaire, which is easy to implement in computers and easy to interact
with. Although multiple choice questionnaires are associated to summative
evaluations, the implemented learning activity uses them within a collaborative
learning activity in which students have to justify, first individually then
collaboratively, their choice with a short text. The developed system was used
and evaluated in a real learning situation; one of the most interesting
findings is not only that students who have to justify their option with a text
perform better than those who have not, but that the pertinence of the text to
the question does not play a major role. This suggests that just asking the
students to justify their answers requires them to do a thinking process which
otherwise they would not do.