The Psychology Of Science Text Comprehension

This volume's goal is to provide readers with up-to-date information on the research and theory of scientific text comprehension. It is widely acknowledged that the comprehension of science and technological artifacts is very difficult for both children and adults. The material is conceptually complex, there is very little background knowledge for most individuals, and the materials are often poorly written. Therefore, it is no surprise that students are turned off from learning science and technology. Given these challenges, it is important to design scientific text in a fashion that fits the cognitive constraints of the learner. The enterprise of textbook design needs to be effectively integrated with research in discourse processing, educational technology, and cognitive science. This book takes a major step in promoting such an integration. This volume: *provides an important integration of research and theory with theoretical, methodological, and educational applications; *includes a number of chapters that cover how science text information affects mental representations and strategies; *introduces important suggestions about how text design and new technologies can be thought of as pedagogical features; and *establishes academic text taxonomies and a consensus of the criteria to organize inferences and other mental mechanisms.

This book deals with the significance of different text structures and its cognitive processing in learning from texts. It discusses the effect of learning abilities and attitudes for learning from texts, and focuses on the significance of processing and learning strategies for text comprehension.

What is text understanding? It is the dynamic process of constructing coherent representations and inferences at multiple levels of text and context, within the bottleneck of a limited-capacity working memory. The field of text and discourse has advanced to the point where researchers have developed sophisticated models of comprehension, and identified the particular assumptions that underlie comprehension mechanisms in precise analytical or mathematical detail. The models offer a priori predictions about thought and behavior, not merely ad hoc descriptions of data. Indeed, the field has evolved to a mature science. The contributors to this volume collectively cover the major models of comprehension in the field of text and discourse. Other books are either narrow -- covering only a single theoretical framework -- or do not focus on systematic modeling efforts. In addition, this book focuses on deep levels of understanding rather than language codes, syntax, and other shallower levels of text analysis. As such, it provides readers with up-to-date information on current psychological models specified in quantitative or analytical detail.

The Science of Reading: A Handbook brings together state-of-the-art reviews of reading research from leading names in the field, to create a highly authoritative, multidisciplinary overview of contemporary knowledge about reading and related skills. Provides comprehensive coverage of the subject, including theoretical approaches, reading processes, stage models of reading, cross-linguistic studies of reading, reading difficulties, the biology of reading, and reading instruction Divided into seven sections:Word Recognition Processes in Reading; Learning to Read and Spell; Reading Comprehension; Reading in Different Languages; Disorders of Reading and Spelling; Biological Bases of Reading; Teaching Reading Edited by well-respected senior figures in the field

First Published in 2007. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume focuses on our understanding of the reading comprehension of adolescents in a high stakes academic environment. Leading researchers share their most current research on each issue, covering theory and empirical research from a range of specializations, including various content areas, English language learners, students with disabilities, and reading assessment. Topics discussed include: cognitive models of reading comprehension and how they relate to typical or atypical development of reading comprehension, reading in history classes, comprehension of densely worded and symbolic mathematical texts, understanding causality in science texts, the more rigorous comprehension standards in English language arts classes, balancing the practical and measurement constraints of the assessment of reading comprehension, understanding the needs and challenges of English language learners and students in special education with respect to the various content areas discussed in this book. This book is of interest to researchers in literacy and educational psychology as well as curriculum developers.

Text comprehension is a critical area of psychological and educational research, and has particular relevance to educational context. The general aim of this international volume Reading Comprehension in Educational Settings is to encourage excellence in research and to bring together teachers, students, researchers and other professionals from different disciplines (e.g. psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, education, information technology, and communication), as well as all those members of the general public who have an interest in the study of reading. The specific objectives of the different chapters in this volume are to analyze existing methods of studying the various aspects of reading comprehension, disseminate results already obtained by research groups working in the field and debate current and future trends in the study of reading.

In this landmark volume, Walter Kintsch presents a theory of human text comprehension that he has refined and developed over the past 20 years.