This study examines the hypothesis that the ability of a reader to learn from text depends on the match between the background knowledge of the reader and the difficulty of the text information. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a statistical technique that represents the content of a document as a vector in high dimensional semantic space based on a large text corpus, is used to predict how much readers will learn from texts based on the estimated conceptual match between their topic knowledge and the text information. Participants completed tests to assess their knowledge of the human heart and circulatory system, then read one of four texts that ranged in difficulty from elementary to medical school level, then completed the tests again. Results show a non-monotonic relationship in which learning was greatest for texts that were neither too easy nor too difficult. LSA proved as effective at predicting learning from these texts as traditional knowledge assessment measures. For these te...

Two measures of lexical cohesion were developed and applied to a corpus of human-computer tutoring dialogs. For both measures, the amount of cohesion in the tutoring dialog was found to be significantly correlated to learning for students with below-mean pretest scores, but not for those with above-mean pre-test scores, even though both groups had similar amounts of cohesion. We also find that only cohesion between tutor and student is significant: the cohesiveness of tutor, or of student, utterances is not. These results are discussed in light of previous work in textual cohesion and recall.

The literature on assessing the cognitive processes involved in hypertext comprehension during the last fifteen years has yielded contradictory results. In this paper we explored a possible factor affecting this situation, mainly the potential effects on comprehension of reading strategies in hypertext. In experiment 1, results showed that reading strategies affect selectively the textbase and the situation model level. The number of different nodes read mainly affected the textbase, whereas the reading order influenced the situation model. In experiment 2, the analysis of reading strategies was used in order to replicate the effect of knowledge and coherence (McNamara & Kintsch, 1996) found in the literature on linear text comprehension, but not replicated in hypertext. Low knowledge participants learnt more by following a high coherent reading order, whereas high knowledge learnt more by reading the hypertext in a low coherence order. Finally, we discussed the theoretical and methodological consequences of this approach for the study of hypertext comprehension. Reading Strategies and Hypertext Comprehension Hypertexts are information systems in which the contents are organized in an interrelated network where the nodes are documents and the links are the relations between these documents. Hypertexts constitute a real alternative to paper documents in fields such as education. Research assessing the cognitive processes involved in hypertext comprehension has grown jointly with the development of these systems in educational fields. However, reviews of the literature published up to 1999 showed little reliable evidence about the processes involved in hypertext comprehension (Dillon & Gabbard, 1998; Unz & Hesse, 1999). In this paper we first describe the results found in...

This study examined a corpus of 10 widely used pre-algebra and algebra textbooks, with the goal of investigating whether they exhibited a symbol precedence view of mathematical development as is found among high school teachers. The textbook analysis focused on the sequence in which problem-solving activities were presented to students. As predicted, textbooks showed the symbol precedence view, presenting symbolic problems prior to verbal problems.

Competing theories of analogical reasoning have disagreed on the relative contributions of surface and structural features to the access of previously read base stories when one is reading a current cue story. A key limitation of the prior work was that surface and structural feature overlap between bases and cues was not manipulated precisely. The present study systematically manipulated the number of surface and structural matches to determine their relative effect on access. Results involving reminding and readingtime measures suggest that surface and lower-order structural features affected access about equally, at least when a higher-order relation (HOR) was shared between a base and cue story. When a HOR was not shared, surface feature overlap continued to affect access while lower-order structural features had a less reliable effect. Models of access might need to be adjusted to account for these phenomena. We are often reminded of a prior problem or example when we are working on a current problem or just learning about a new situation. However, the problem or example that comes to mind might or might not be all that relevant. The factors that influence which prior cases one is reminded of have been of interest to a variety of researchers, particularly those who study analogical

Abstract. A previously reported measure of dialog cohesion was extended to measure cohesion by counting semantic similarity (the repetition of meaning) as well as lexical reiteration (the repetition of words) cohesive ties. Adding semantic similarity ties improved the algorithm’s correlation with learning among high pre-testers in one of our corpora of tutoring dialogs, where the lexical reiteration measure alone had correlated only for low pre-testers. Counting cohesive ties which have increasing semantic distance increases the measure’s correlation with learning in that corpus. We also find that both directions of tie, student-to-tutor and tutor-to-student, are equally important in producing these correlations. Finally, we present evidence suggesting that the correlations we find may be with deeper “far transfer ” learning. 1

What is literally digital about literacy today is how much of what is read and written has been electronically conveyed as binary strings of one and zeros, before appearing as letters, words, numbers, symbols, and images on the screens and pages of our literate lives. This digital aspect of literacy, invisible to the naked eye, is the very currency that drives the global information economy. Yet what we see of this literacy is remarkably continuous with the literacy of print culture, right down to the very serifs that grace many of the fonts of digital literacy. So begins the paradox that while digital literacy constitutes an entirely new medium for reading and writing, it is but a further extension of what writing first made of language. 1 On the one hand, long-standing scholars of this new medium, such as Donald Leu, favor treating digital literacy as itself a “great transformation, ” holding that such technologies do nothing less than “rapidly and continuously redefine the nature of literacy. ” 2 We tend, on the other hand, to look to the continuities and extensions achieved through the introduction of digital literacy into a print culture, while seeking to understand how these developments encourage what is most admirable about the nature of literacy. 3

In 3 experiments, the authors examined the role of knowledge activation in the suppression of contextually irrelevant meanings for ambiguous homographs. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants with greater baseball knowledge, regardless of reading skill, more quickly suppressed the irrelevant meaning of ambiguous words in baseball-related, but not general-topic, sentences. Experiment 3 demonstrated that participants with greater general knowledge, regardless of reading skill, more quickly suppressed the irrelevant meaning of the ambiguous words in general-topic sentences. As predicted by D. S. McNamara’s (1997) knowledge-based account of suppression, ambiguity effects are influenced by greater activation of knowledge related to the intended meaning of the homograph. These results challenge inhibition (e.g., M. A. Gernsbacher, K. R. Varner, & M. Faust, 1990) as the sole mechanism responsible for the suppression of irrelevant information. Text and discourse present numerous challenges for the comprehender. One facet of communication that is particularly challenging is the resolution of lexical ambiguity. For example, homographs such as bug, match, draft, and mold have multiple meanings, and when these homographs are encountered, the comprehender

The SNePS knowledge representation, reasoning, and acting system has several features that facilitate metacognition in SNePS-based agents. The most prominent is the fact that propositions are represented in SNePS as terms rather than as sentences, so that propositions can occur as arguments of propositions and other expressions without leaving first-order logic. The SNePS acting subsystem is integrated with the SNePS reasoning subsystem in such a way that: there are acts that affect what an agent believes; there are acts that specify knowledge-contingent acts and lack-of-knowledge acts; there are policies that serve as “daemons”, triggering acts when certain propositions are believed or wondered about. The GLAIR agent architecture supports metacognition by specifying a location for the source of self-awareness, and of a sense of situatedness in the world. Several SNePS-based agents have taken advantage of these facilities to engage in self-awareness and metacognition.

This article provides a review and analysis of research targeting the rift separating history written for adults and the historical texts aimed at K-12 audiences--specifically history textbooks. The role of per-sonal agency in historical writing, both for those who write and those who read, is emphasized as an important element separating the two rhetorical genres. A body of research exploring what students learn from reading and the complex process of reasoning that goes along with interpreting their history textbooks is reviewed. In particular, it focuses on how students learn from texts and on recent trends in the study of teaching and learning history that underscore the role of authorship in historical texts. The author discusses the relative silence of authorial voices within the discourse of history textbooks, arguing that this anonymous, authoritative style of writing may be an impor-tant contributing factor to the impoverished conception of history noted in the literature of school history reform. The first law for the historian is that he shall never dare to utter an un-truth. The second is that he shall suppress nothing that is true. Moreover, there shall be no suspicion of partiality in his writing, or of malice. (Cicero,