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The aim of this study is to demonstrate the usefulness of developing health education materials with a theoretical and empirical research basis. With a specific focus on increasing knowledge, the authors utilized well-researched principles in cognitive psychology to increase the message comprehension of an existing health education brochure. The brochure used was produced by a Dutch national campaign office for preventing alcohol abuse among undergraduate students. In two experimental studies, the original version of the brochure was compared with the theory-based modified version on measures of knowledge and psychosocial determinants of alcohol use among undergraduate university students. The results show ...

This study assessed the impact of readability and personalization of informed consent forms on initial impressions of therapists and on recall of the information provided on the forms. Eighty-five participants received consent forms that varied in terms of readability and personalization, and were asked to rate their impressions of the therapist. More readable forms increased participants' impressions of the therapist's expertness and the form's helpfulness. Personalized forms increased ratings of the attractiveness of the therapist, and of the relevance of—and satisfaction with—the forms. Personalized forms also tended to increase recall. These properties of consent forms may indeed influence how clients ...

Although prior knowledge and reading-comprehension skill have both been shown to influence learning from text, recent research based on the Kintsch (1988) model of text understanding leads to the hypothesis that the development of the text-base representation of text contents should be a function of reading-comprehension skill and not of prior knowledge, whereas the development of a situation model should be a function of the individual's prior knowledge and not of the reader's comprehension skill. Furthermore, the extent to which knowledge and comprehension skill influence learning from text was hypothesized to be a function of text contents. Using fictitious historical ...

In een tekst kan de schrijver naar een bepaald concept verwijzen door steeds hetzelfde woord te gebruiken of door woorden met een (vrijwel) identieke betekenis door elkaar te gebruiken. Aan de hand van een fondswervingsbrief is nagegaan welke effecten het gebruik van synoniemen heeft op de lezer in vergelijking met woordherhaling. Hiertoe is eerst een stipulatieve definitie van synonymie geformuleerd. In de twee vooronderzoeken is vervolgens deze definitie empirisch beproefd en zijn voor de tekstmanipulatie twee groepen samengesteld van sterke respectievelijk zwakke synoniemen. Op grond hiervan zijn de theoretische criteria uitgereid met een empirisch gegeven: verschil in bekendheid. In het ...

Eight experiments evaluated a core assumption of several theories of text processing, the shared resource assumption, which states that component text processes share limited processing resources. Short texts each contained two critical sentences that together warranted a causal inference. The syntactic structure of the second sentence was either more or less difficult to parse. Results from a lexical decision task suggested that readers formed the causal inferences when the syntactic structure was less difficult to parse but that inferencing was constrained when syntactic structure was more difficult. Follow-up experiments suggested that this interference was not due to inferior output of ...

Eight experiments evaluated a core assumption of several theories of text processing, the shared resource assumption, which states that component text processes share limited processing resources. Short texts each contained two critical sentences that together warranted a causal inference. The syntactic structure of the second sentence was either more or less difficult to parse. Results from a lexical decision task suggested that readers formed the causal inferences when the syntactic structure was less difficult to parse but that inferencing was constrained when syntactic structure was more difficult. Follow-up experiments suggested that this interference was not due to inferior output of ...

We investigated the effect of spatial memory capacity and content maps on readers' memory for hypertext structure. Simple hierarchical hypertexts were built on four topics. For each topic there was a 6-node and a 9-node version. Each version came with or without a content map. Young adult participants were asked to read each hypertext with the purpose of learning the contents and structure. Then, they had to recall the layout of nodes and links. Memory for links varied as a function of spatial memory and the presence or absence of a map. When no map was available, high spatial memory ...

Eight experiments evaluated a core assumption of several theories of text processing, the shared resource assumption, which states that component text processes share limited processing resources. Short texts each contained two critical sentences that together warranted a causal inference. The syntactic structure of the second sentence was either more or less difficult to parse. Results from a lexical decision task suggested that readers formed the causal inferences when the syntactic structure was less difficult to parse but that inferencing was constrained when syntactic structure was more difficult. Follow-up experiments suggested that this interference was not due to inferior output of ...

Eight experiments evaluated a core assumption of several theories of text processing, the shared resource assumption, which states that component text processes share limited processing resources. Short texts each contained two critical sentences that together warranted a causal inference. The syntactic structure of the second sentence was either more or less difficult to parse. Results from a lexical decision task suggested that readers formed the causal inferences when the syntactic structure was less difficult to parse but that inferencing was constrained when syntactic structure was more difficult. Follow-up experiments suggested that this interference was not due to inferior output of ...

Objective To assess parental understanding of body mass index (BMI) and BMI percentiles by using standard versus color-coded charts; to investigate how parental literacy and/or numeracy (quantitative skills) affects that understanding. Methods A convenience sample of 163 parents of children aged 2 to 8 years at 2 academic pediatric centers completed a demographics questionnaire, the mathematics portion of the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT-3R), the Short Test of Functional Health Literacy in Adults (S-TOFHLA), and an “Understanding BMI” questionnaire, which included parallel BMI charting questions to compare understanding of standard versus color-coded BMI charting. Outcomes included parental-reported versus actual understanding of BMI, the ...