This study examined whether or not fourth-graders could fully demonstrate their writing skills on the computer and factors associated with their performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) computer-based writing assessment. The results suggest that high-performing fourth-graders (those who scored in the upper 20 percent…

This article advances the bio-kinetic hypothesis that the complexity and nonlinear dynamics of language can be approached on the basis of the Agent-action-Objective (AaO) paradigm. It is shown that the derived AaO units rotate and that AaO-governed rotations include functions that can be imagined in real time, provided that a dot marking the state…

The present study examined the unique contributions of readers' goal and text structure on comprehension. In Experiment 1, participants read procedural and descriptive passages to perform the procedures, summarize the passages, or to answer questions. The perform goal showed highest comprehension, with no difference due to text type. In Experiment…

Students are often asked to integrate information derived from reading multiple documents into a consistent story or model. Based on models of comprehending individual text, we predict that the structure and accessibility of earlier texts should influence one's ability to integrate a new text with previously learned material. In two experiments,…