Finds that students understand reading and writing as demonstrations of what they know, with the purpose of giving teachers what they want, and the hope of getting an "A." Shows that they begin to believe themselves so incompetent that they no longer enjoy reading and writing; indeed, they read and write as little as possible. (SR)

Tests a model of question answering called WHEN, which explains the answer descriptions that are generated when college students answer "when" questions. Finds that the answers given systematically varied as a function of temporal interval in a fashion that supported most of the production rules of the WHEN model. (RS)

Suggests that a factor underlying the complex analysis of prose is amount of elaboration. Reports findings of two experiments supporting this idea. (FL)

Analyses several hundred essays written by an equal number of male and female college students in response to two separate prompts on a writing proficiency test. Finds partial support for the hypotheses that men focus on an individual's autonomy and women on relationships. Finds, however, that themes of autonomy are overall the most common themes.…

Examines the components of text that predict reading times and recall in skilled and less skilled college readers. Finds that sensitivity to the structure of the text was not a source of reading-ability differences in reading times and recall. Suggests that reading-ability differences result from word-decoding factors and the efficiency of…

Examines the influence of language proficiency and comprehension skill on situation-model construction during narrative comprehension. Studies 12 college students who thought aloud reading French and English stories for comprehension and who performed a verb-clustering task after reading each text. Finds that the students generated more…

Investigates the reading comprehension skills of 34 college students, particularly the roles of basic reading processes and prior knowledge in understanding expository texts. Indicates that word identification and propositional encoding measures were related to individual differences in reading comprehension ability. (HB)