Focusing on what authors can do to facilitate learning from content area textbooks, this report labels authors as "considerate," providing text that readers can understand with a minimum of cognitive effort, or as "inconsiderate," creating text that requires a conscientious, highly skilled effort if readers are to comprehend…

A study was conducted to examine learning from textbook sentences that provide examples. It was predicted that an example written succinctly and with a word order that emphasized its parallel semantic relations with the exemplified principle, such as "animals have parasites; dogs have fleas," would have a positive effect on idea comprehension. It…

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,…