The ability to locate the desired information, evaluate the quality of the information, and synthesizing and comparing information across multiple sources has been regarded as multiple-text comprehension and as one of the 21st century competences. The current study will provide a browser-based epistemic prompt for students to reflect on the trustworthiness and relevance of the online texts and encourage them to constantly summarizing and comparing the materials they viewed in order to facilitate their English multimodal multiple text comprehension (MMTC). Specifically, we intended to ask the following three research questions.
1) How well do university students perform in their English MMTC?
2) What are learners’ cognitive and affective characteristics that predict university students’ English MMTC?
3) How will learners’ cognitive and affective characteristics moderate the epistemic prompting effect on learners’ English MMTC?
Participants were forty-eight university students from a psychology-related course. They participated in the study in return of partial credit for the course. 68.75% of the participants were female. Students’ were randomly assigned to the experiment group or the control group. The experiment group were provided with a browser-embedded note-taking device along with the epistemic prompting for students’ source evaluation. The control group were provided with the browser-embedded note-taking device only. Analysis results showed that learners MMTC performance was generally low. There was a statistically significant epistemic prompting effect on learners’ MMTC while learners’ English ability did not predict MMTC. Particularly, we found learners in the treatment group scored significantly lower than those in the control group. Implications of the study results were discussed regarding the intervention and instruction for MMTC among EFL learners in light of the cognitive load theory.