Text Processing: The Influence of Text Structure, Background Knowledge, and Purpose

The Relation of Moral Judgment Development and Educational Experience to Recall of Moral Narratives and Expository Texts

“…Text comprehension is greatly influenced by the congruity between reader background and specific text content (e.g., Ohlhausen & Roller, 1988), which is facilitated by a greater amount of knowledge considered analogous to subject matter knowledge (Alexander, Pate, & Kulikowich, 1989;Hayes & Tierney, 1982;Kulikowich & Alexander, 1990;Walker, 1987) and expertise in the subject of the text (Meutsch, 1989). Of course, text comprehension is also related to the educational background of the reader (e.g., Anderson, Reynolds, Schallert, & Goetz, 1977;Birkmire, 1985), but beyond education, expertise differences in a particular domain have been directly related to differences in the ability to make inferences and construct-relevant schematic and conceptual models of text events (Singer, Harkness, & Stewart, 1997;Spilich et al).…”

Procedural Text: Predictions of Importance Ratings and Recall by Models of Text Comprehension

“…It appears that some of the high level propositions were not recalled because they were assumed, -nd some of the low level propositions were well rec-alled because they contained details which were very salient (Birkmire, 1985). While not s~gnificant for the idea units, some trends were in opposite directions for ratings and recall.…”

Interactive, Compensatory Reading Strategies

“…In contrast, task-based importance was denned as text information that is important due to external constraints. Typical examples include reading for a particular type of information (Birkmire, 1985;Reynolds & Anderson, 1982), under an assigned perspective (Kardash, Royer, & Greene, 1988), or given different encoding instructions (Alexander, 1986). Schraw et al (1993) reported two main findings in their study: (a) Segments high on either the text-based or task-based dimensions were recalled better than segments low on these dimensions, and (b) segments high on the taskbased dimension were recalled well regardless of text-based importance.…”