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...

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...

ABSTRACT. Moral text processing was used as an ecologically valid method for assessing implicit and explicit moral understanding and development. The authors tested undergraduates, seminarians, and graduate students in political science and philosophy for recall of moral narratives and moral expository texts. Multivariate analyses of covariance using educational experience as an independent variable, age and moral judgment score as covariates, and recall of embedded moral arguments as dependent variables revealed a relation between education and level of moral arguments recalled. Lower-stage moral reasoning was best recalled by undergraduates, whereas higher-stage reasoning was best recalled by graduate students, with seminarians intermediate for both types of text. Moral judgment score was related to recall of the highest-level moral arguments even when age and educational experience were controlled. Moral judgment development appeared to be particularly helpful in recall of expository compared with narrative texts.