No abstract

No abstract

Results suggest that narrative and expository processing differ with respect to integration of text content with prior knowledge.

Results suggest that in terms of to-be-learned content, expository texts trigger students to utilize relevant prior knowledge more than narrative texts.

The author examined memory for text in terms of the independent influences of semantic knowledge associations and text organization. Semantic associations were operationalized as the semantic relatedness between individual text concepts and the text as a whole and assessed with latent semantic analysis. The author assessed text organization by simulating comprehension with the construction integration model. Text organization consistently accounted for unique variance in recall. Semantic associations strongly predicted expository recall and predicted narrative recall significantly but to a lesser extent, even when the familiarity of the narrative content was manipulated. Results suggest that prior semantic associations and novel associations in the text structure influence memory independently, and that these influences can be affected by text genre.

No abstract

O ver the past thirty years, a broad base of knowledge about religious doubt has accumulated. Yet, this phenomenon in human cognition remains a controversial and confusing topic among many Christians (Guinness, 1976; McLaren, 2003). Some of the misunderstanding about religious doubt can be eliminated by taking into account the identity status of doubters and their unique experiences with identity formation. More specifically, Marcia's ego-identity statuses can function as an interpretative lens assisting interested persons in comprehending religious doubt and coping with it. Unfortunately, the relationship between religious doubt and identity statuses has been understudied.

Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a computational model of human knowledge representation that approximates semantic relatedness judgments. Two issues are discussed that researchers must attend to when evaluating the utility of LSA for predicting psychological phenomena. First, the role of semantic relatedness in the psychological process of interest must be understood. LSA indices of similarity should then be derived from this theoretical understanding. Second, the knowledge base (semantic space) from which similarity indices are generated must contain "knowledge" that is appropriate to the task at hand. Proposed solutions are illustrated with data from an experiment in which LSA-based indices were generated from theoretical analysis of the processes involved in understanding two conflicting accounts of a historical event. These indices predict the complexity of subsequent student reasoning about the event, as well as hand-coded predictions generated from thinkaloud protocols collected when students were reading the accounts of the event.