By asking questions, students can practice many cognitive processes, and these processes may reflect clues about their thinking skills. In order to understand students' cognitive levels in thinking, questions can be used as agents. Doing so, this study focuses on examining students' questions in terms of cognitive levels of Bloom's revised…

Textbooks are heavily used in secondary-level content area classes, but previous research has identified numerous challenges for students associated with reading and understanding these texts. While students can learn reading strategies that help them better understand text, it is unclear the extent to which textbooks are written to promote or…

Features of eighth-grade history textbooks were examined through replication of a 20-year-old study that investigated "considerateness" of textbooks. Considerate texts provide clear, coherent information and include features that promote students' comprehension, such as explicit use of organizational structures, a range of question types…

In this study, we examine the effect of background knowledge and local cohesion on learning from texts. The study is based on construction-integration model. Participants were 176 undergraduate students who read a Computer Science text. Half of the participants read a text of maximum local cohesion and the other a text of minimum local cohesion.…

Although there is a rich literature on the role of text genre and structure on students' literal comprehension, more research is needed regarding the role of these text features on students' high-level comprehension as evidenced in their small-group discussions. As such, the present study examined the effects of text genre (i.e., narrative and…

A study tested the effects of timed versus untimed practice using text passages containing inserted adjunct questions. These effects were measured in terms of performance on repeated, related, and unrelated test questions. Subjects were 47 college students in Florida randomly assigned to one of two groups. One group was allowed a fixed amount of…

Investigates the influence of four types of predictions on the story understanding of sixth graders. Asks prediction questions, prediction plus justification questions, prediction plus review questions, or no questions. Analyzes retellings to determine information percentage included from original story. Indicates that differences in what students…

Notes that three groups of fifth graders either read an original social studies text, read a revised version, or were asked questions while reading the original text. Finds no differences among the three groups in amount of information recalled and the number of questions answered correctly, but students who were asked questions tended to recall…

This study examined whether reference questions based on the text-linguistic structure of scientific literature would enable users to express their information needs effectively. Subjects with similar levels of topic familiarity completed online search forms that used open, bibliographic, or (text-linguistic) structural questions. Questions based…

Examines acquisition, maintenance, and transfer of a questioning strategy in second- and third-grade students using a multiple-baseline design. Indicates that knowledge of text structure increased and that students could reliably differentiate text structure. Describes the establishment of a 4-week procedure for integrating the questioning…

A study investigated the effects of inserting questions in a computer-mediated text that required readers to review relevant portions of the text when a question was answered incorrectly. Undergraduate students (n=36) served as their own controls while reading a scientific text under 3 treatment conditions that varied as to the consequences of an…

The effects of conceptual change text and application questions in 139 college students' learning of electricity concepts were investigated. The experiment was a 2X2X2X2 factorial. Compared to traditional text and no questions, conceptual change text and application questions, respectively, improved acquisition of qualitative concepts.…

Examines whether the comprehension of English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) students who were trained to summarize improved more than that of students who responded to short-answer questions. Finds that since the reading comprehension of all classes improved significantly, the study could not prove that either approach was the major cause of this…

Ten eighth grade U.S. history textbooks were evaluated with respect to factors such as readability level, global coherence, local coherence, questioning techniques, and vocabulary development. Findings indicated that texts had a mean readability level of 10.9; only 30 percent provided review of previous chapters; few offered introductory…