No abstract

No abstract

In this study, we examine the nature and quality of students' comprehension of history. Specifically, we explore whether cognitive-psychological theories developed to capture the comprehension of narrative text can be used to capture the comprehension of history. Participants were 36 students with learning disabilities who had taken part in an earlier study designed to investigate the effects of an interactive instructional intervention in history. The results of the original study supported the effectiveness of the intervention in terms of amount recalled. The results of the present study reveal that historical understanding can be characterized as the construction of meaning through the creation of a causal network of events. The study of history within a causal network framework has implications for understanding the nature and quality of students' learning of history, and for potentially identifying sources of failure in learning.

This study investigated the generation of emotional inferences during the reading and recall of narrative texts. Experiment 1 compared the fit of two simulations of text comprehension to the recall data. One simulation examined causal and referential inferences, while the other examined causal, referential and emotional inferences. We found that the simulation that involved emotional inferences provided a better fit to the human data than the other simulation. Experiment 2 tested whether emotional inferences are generated online by recording lexical decision times at pre-inference and inference locations. Lexical decision times were faster at the inference than the pre-inference locations. These findings suggest that emotional inferences play a role in the understanding of natural texts, and that they require the reader to establish connections between text segments.