Ozuru, Y., Dempsey, K., Sayroo, J., & McNamara, D. S. (2005). Effects of text cohesion on comprehension of biology texts. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 1696-1701.

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

2005

Ozuru, Y., Dempsey, K., Sayroo, J., & McNamara, D. S. (2005). Effects of text cohesion on comprehension of biology texts. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 1696-1701.

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This study explored the effect of text cohesion on reading comprehension of challenging science texts among students with little topic-relevant knowledge. Introductory level psychology students, considered to have a low level of knowledge on the topic, read high and low cohesion versions of biology texts. After reading the texts, their comprehension of the texts was assessed with text-based or inference-based open-ended comprehension questions. The results showed that participants benefited from high cohesion texts. The benefit was observed only for text-based questions, and the positive effect was marginally larger for skilled compared to unskilled readers. This study provides a better understanding of how text cohesion affects one's comprehension of science texts.

The experiment indicated that revising texts, by increasing referential and explanatory cohesion, helps students understand biology texts even when the text content is highly unfamiliar to them. However, the benefit of cohesion was quite small and limited to questions that requested information explicitly provided within individual sentences in the text. Thus, in this case, the cohesion did not help the low knowledge students understand the relation between ideas - it only helped them understand individual ideas in the text.

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