McNamara, D. S. (2001). Reading both high-coherence and low-coherence texts: Effects of text sequence and prior knowledge. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 55(1), 51-62.

McNamara, D.

2001

McNamara, D. S. (2001). Reading both high-coherence and low-coherence texts: Effects of text sequence and prior knowledge. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 55(1), 51-62.

geen

Previous research (e.g., McNamara, Kintsch, Songer, & Kintsch, 1996) has demonstrated that high-knowledge readers learn more from low-coherence than high-coherence texts. This study further examined the assumption that this advantage is due to the use of knowledge to fill in the gaps in the text, resulting in an integration of the text with prior knowledge. Participants read either a high- or low-coherence text twice, or they read both the high- and low-coherence texts in one order or the other. Reading the low-coherence text first should force the reader to use prior knowledge to fill in the conceptual gaps. However, reading the high-coherence text first was predicted to negate the necessity of using prior knowledge to understand the low-coherence text when the latter was presented second. As predicted, high-knowledge readers benefited from the low-coherence only text when it was read first. Low-knowledge readers benefited from the high-coherence text, regardless of whether it was read first, second, or twice.

As predicted, there was an interaction between the first text's coherence and the reader's prior knowledge. High-knowledge readers benefited from reading the low-coherence text first, whereas low-knowledge readers benefited fromvreading the high-coherence text first. This result indicates that exposing high-knowledge readers to the high-coherence text reduces the need for knowledge-based inferences. When the low-coberence text was presented second, it could be understood by generating inferences based on the high-coherence text, and not by using prior knowledge. Hence, this study supports the assumption that high-knowledge readers will learn more from a low-coherence text because they are more likely to generate knowledge-based inferences while reading the text.

80

1