Some of the recent electronic learning environments have moved beyond the conventional delivery of text, multimedia, and objective tests. There are systems with animated conversational agents, intelligent adaptive tutoring, interactive simulations, and other features designed to engage learners and promote deeper comprehension. One system is AutoTutor, a learning environment that tutors students by holding a conversation in natural language. AutoTutor’s design was inspired by explanation-based constructivist theories of learning, intelligent tutoring systems that adaptively respond to student knowledge, and empirical research on dialogue patterns in tutorial discourse. AutoTutor presents challenging questions and then engages in mixed initiative dialogue that guides the student in building an answer. It provides feedback to the student on what the student types in (positive, neutral, negative feedback), pumps the student for more information, prompts the student to fill in missing words, gives hints, fills in missing information, identifies and

Does the reader comprehend the text because the reader is able or because the text is easy? Localizing the cause of comprehension in either the reader or the text is fraught with contradictions. A proposed solution uses a Rasch equation to models comprehension as the difference between a reader measure and text measure. Computing such a difference requires that reader and text are measured on a common scale. Thus, the puzzle is solved by positing a single continuum along which texts and readers can be conjointly ordered. A reader’s comprehension of a text is a function of the difference between reader ability and text readability. This solution forces recognition that generalizations about reader performance can be text independent (reader ability) or text dependent (comprehension). The article explores how reader ability and text readability can be measured on a single continuum, and the implications that this formulation holds for reading theory, the teaching of reading, and the testing of reading. 1

Users of educational hypertext are faced with the challenge of creating meaning both within and between texts. Cohesion is an important factor contributing to whether a reader is able to capture meaning and comprehend text. When readers are required to fill in conceptual gaps in text, comprehension can fail if they do not have sufficient knowledge. Cohesion helps low-knowledge readers to create a more coherent mental representation of the text. However, text that is too cohesive can inhibit active processing, and thus reduce coherence for more knowledgeable readers. Similar patterns have been found for hypertext, which requires readers to create coherence between multiple electronic texts. Domain novices are in greater need of explicit pointers to important links between documents and gain from having less control over system navigation. Domain experts are in less need of scaffolding within the system. We discuss the use of a multimedia reading strategy training program to help low-knowledge readers better understand less cohesive text. Finally, we discuss four principles to guide hypertext development geared toward improving coherence and metacognitive engagement.

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