Learning from Text

Abstract

One of the most important goals of educational institutions in Western culture (as well as many other cultures) is to help students learn how to acquire information from written text. The person who can read well has a means of obtaining knowledge on almost any topic, with little assistance from anyone else. However, an equal burden falls on the writer, since characteristics of a passage, quite apart from the complexity of the content, greatly influence what readers understand and retain from it. An understanding of the psychological processes involved in learning from text should provide a basis for assisting people to become more effective readers and communicators. No book, let alone a single chapter, could adequately review all the research related to learning from text. Any comprehensive attempt would include research in many fields, including rhetoric, communication, education, artificial intelligence, and areas of linguistics and psychology as well as branches of philosophy and neurology. Thus this chapter must be sharply limited in its scope of review. Since Carroll (1971) has reviewed the literature related to learning from text through 1970, our focus is on publications in the first half of the present decade. We primarily consider studies involving prose, that is, connected discourse consisting of more than a single sentence. The studies included typically involved competent learners (usually adults) who read or heard individual short passages. Thus questions about the development of reading or listening competence, or about learning from more extended texts (for