Ozuru, Y., Dempsey, K., & McNamara, D. S. (2009). Prior knowledge, reading skill, and text cohesion in the comprehension of science texts. Learning and Instruction, 19(3), 228-242.

Ozuru, Y.; Dempsey, K.; McNamara, D.

2009

Ozuru, Y., Dempsey, K., & McNamara, D. S. (2009). Prior knowledge, reading skill, and text cohesion in the comprehension of science texts. Learning and Instruction, 19(3), 228-242.

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This study examined how text features (i.e., cohesion) and individual differences (i.e., reading skill and prior knowledge) contribute to biology text comprehension. College students with low and high levels of biology knowledge read two biology texts, one of which was high in cohesion and the other low in cohesion. The two groups were similar in reading skill. Participants' text comprehension was assessed with open-ended comprehension questions that measure different levels of comprehension (i.e., text-based, local-bridging, global-bridging). Results indicated: (a) reading a high-cohesion text improved text-based comprehension; (b) overall comprehension was positively correlated with participants' prior knowledge, and (c) the degree to which participants benefited from reading a high-cohesion text depended on participants' reading skill, such that skilled participants gained more from high-cohesion text. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The results indicated that science-text comprehension, as measured by performance on comprehension questions, was affected by both reading skill and prior knowledge. However, the regression analyses indicated that prior knowledge is a more significant predictor of text comprehension than reading skill. Prior knowledge explained a significant amount of variance of performance on comprehension questions above and beyond reading skill, and the beta weight of reading skill was notably smaller than the beta weights of biology knowledge and topic-specific knowledge.

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