Eighty college students read textbook passages that either included marginal inserts to signal key concepts or did not include these inserts. Signaling key concepts enhanced performance on content quizzes overall and on subsets of items assessing signaled material. Performance was not affected on subsets of items for nonsignaled content. Students…

Suggests that those who evaluate textbooks for adoption in schools use a framework such as the one included, which examines writing style, tone, analogies and illustrations, sentence and paragraph coherence, headings and subheadings, and location of charts, graphs, and figures. (JC)

Investigated is a reader's ability to comprehend written text that is highly novel with few semantic cues. The theoretical perspective, assessment theory, materials and methods, and the results of this study are discussed. (KR)

Papers in this report were presented at a conference on text characteristics, convened as part of the Learning from Text Project. The foreword describes the University of California and California State University Joint Projects Steering Committee project to determine the relationship between ability to learn from text and academic achievement,…

Intended to help teachers both improve students' text comprehension and better understand the teaching-learning process involved, this book focuses on comprehension and concept development as the central core of an effective educational program. The book's five sections deal with teaching explicit comprehension skills, precomprehension and…