Determination of fact and opinion: A critical reading problem

This study set out to discover whether readers can make accurate judgments about fact and opinion paragraphs standing alone and the parts of the text the readers consider in making their judgments about the factual quality of a paragraph. An experiment was designed to try to address the above problems. For this experiment two forms of a questionnaire were devised. The first form contained introductory paragraphs taken from newspapers. The second form contained the same paragraphs along with the headlines for these paragraphs. The subjects were asked to do two things: first, rate the paragraphs for fact/opinion on a 7-point semantic differential scale; second, underline the words used to make fact/opinion determinations. It was found that readers can judge paragraphs standing alone for fact/opinion. Also, headlines are significant factors in determining fact/opinion. In the second part of the experiment, it was found that readers use specific types of words to help in deciding whether a text is fact or opinion. Furthermore, the evidence seems to indicate that readers use both text and context in making these determinations.