ARE GOOD TEXTS ALWAYS BETTER - INTERACTIONS OF TEXT COHERENCE, BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE, AND LEVELS OF UNDERSTANDING IN LEARNING FROM TEXT

Two experiments, theoretically motivated by the construction-integrati on model of text comprehension (W. Kintsch, 1988), investigated the ro le of text coherence in the comprehension of science texts. In Experim ent 1, junior high school students' comprehension of one of three vers ions of a biology text was examined via free recall, written questions , and a key-word sorting task. This study demonstrates advantages for globally coherent text and for more explanatory text. In Experiment 2, interactions among local and global text coherence, readers' backgrou nd knowledge, and levels of understanding were examined. Using the sam e methods as in Experiment 1, we examined students' comprehension of o ne of four versions of a text, orthogonally varying local and global c oherence. We found that readers who know little about the domain of th e text benefit from a coherent text, whereas high-knowledge readers be nefit from a minimally coherent text. We argue that the poorly written text forces the knowledgeable readers to engage in compensatory proce ssing to infer unstated relations in the text. These findings, however , depended on the level of understanding, text base or situational, be ing measured by the three comprehension tasks. Whereas the free-recall measure and text-based questions primarily tapped readers' superficia l understanding of the text, the inference questions, problem-solving questions, and sorting task relied on a situational understanding of t he text. This study provides evidence that the rewards to be gained fr om active processing are primarily at the level of the situation model rather than at the superficial level of text-base understanding.