Though the empirical findings of the past studies in the literature have offered strong support to the significant role of language knowledge and background knowledge in reading comprehension, this issue has not been explored with regard to specific purposes tests in the Iranian higher education context. Therefore, this study aimed at exploring…

The purpose of this study was to investigate bridging inferences and learning when students with low topic knowledge read multiple complementary biology texts. Using a think-aloud protocol, we assessed students' (n = 74) cognitive processes while they read one text about principles of natural selection and three texts about examples of natural…

This study demonstrates the generalization of previous laboratory results showing the benefits of self-explanation reading training (SERT) to college students' course exam performance. The participants were 265 students enrolled in an Introductory Biology course, 59 of whom were provided with SERT training. The results showed that SERT benefited…