Two experiments, theoretically motivated by the construction-integration model of text comprehension ( W. Kintsch, 1988), investigated the role of text coherence in the comprehension of science texts. In Experiment 1, junior high school students' comprehension of one of three versions of a biology text was examined via free recall, written questions, and a key-word sorting task. This study demonstrates advantages for globally coherent text and for more explanatory text. In Experiment 2, interactions among local and global text coherence, readers' background knowledge, and levels of understanding were examined. Using the same methods as in Experiment 1, we examined students' comprehension of one of four versions of a text, orthogonally varying local and global coherence. We found that readers who know little about the domain of the text benefit from a coherent text, whereas high-knowledge readers benefit from a minimally coherent text. We argue that the poorly written text forces the knowledgeable readers to engage in compensatory processing to infer unstated relations in the text. These findings, however, depended on the level of understanding, text base or situational, being measured by the three comprehension tasks. Whereas the free-recall measure and text-based questions primarily tapped readers' superficial understanding of the text, the inference questions, problem-solving questions, and sorting task relied on a situational understanding of the text. This study provides evidence that the rewards to be gained from active processing are primarily at the level of the situation model rather than at the superficial level of text-base understanding.

Subject Sampler This paper focuses on using a subject sampler to incorporate major components of the information processing system and advance organizers into an online course. This paper should help teachers develop ideas that enhance encoding, and provide a method by which they can build bridges between both isolated content within teaching units and student’s prior knowledge and the new information. 2

Genre recognition is a critical facet of text comprehension and text classification. In three experiments, we assessed the minimum number of words in a sentence needed for genre recognition to occur, the distribution of genres across text, and the relationship between reading ability and genre recognition. We also propose and demonstrate a computational model for genre recognition. Using corpora of narrative, history, and science sentences, we found that readers could recognize the genre of over 80 % of the sentences and that recognition generally occurred within the first three words of sentences; in fact, 51 % of the sentences could be correctly identified by the first word alone. We also report findings that many texts are heterogeneous in terms of genre. That is, around 20 % of text appears to include sentences from other genres. In addition, our computational models fit closely the judgments of human result. This study offers a novel approach to genre identification at the sub-sentential level and has important implications for fields as diverse as reading comprehension and computational text classification.

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.

The current study investigates the relation between retrieval effort and the relative memory strength of mentally stored information. A previous pupillary study by Magliero (1983) showed that encoding effort reacts to the recency effect but no studies have linked effort as measured by pupillary dilation to the frequency effect. In the current study, phasic pupil dilation of 15 participants was measured and analyzed during retrieval tasks while they were learning topographical facts. The facts were studied once and tested during four repetitions in one of two repetition-interval conditions. We hypothesized that retrieval effort will decrease as the relative strength of a memory trace increases. This hypothesis accounts for recency effects as well as for frequency effects. Analysis of the phasic pupil response in the experiment shows a significant main effect for the repetition interval condition. Furthermore an interaction effect between the number of repetitions and repetition interval was found, indicating that the difference in effort between short and long repetition intervals decreased as the number of rehearsals increased. These findings largely confirm our hypotheses and the assumptions of theories that assume that increased retrieval effort increases learning gains.