McNamara, D. S., Kintsch, E., Songer, N. B., & Kintsch, W. (1996). Are good texts always better? interactions of text coherence, background knowledge, and levels of understanding in learning from text. Cognition and Instruction, 14(1), 1-43.

McNamara, D.; Kintsch, E.; Butler Songer, N.; Kintsch, W.

1996

McNamara, D. S., Kintsch, E., Songer, N. B., & Kintsch, W. (1996). Are good texts always better? interactions of text coherence, background knowledge, and levels of understanding in learning from text. Cognition and Instruction, 14(1), 1-43.

2

Two studies are reported that explore the role of text coherence in the comprehension of science texts, using the construction-integration model of text comprehension. Experiment 1 utilized free recall, written questions, & key-word sorting by junior high students (N = 36, aged 11-15), & found that globally coherent text is most advantageous. Experiment 2 utilized the same method (N = 56, aged 11-15) to explore interactions among local & global texts; it was found that those with little prior knowledge of a text benefit most from a clear text, but that those with prior knowledge can gain greater benefit from a less coherent text than those without it.

We examined students' comprehension of one of four versions of a txt, 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 relationships in text.

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