What are textbooks that teach? How can they help solve pedagogical problems? How can their pedagogical design be improved? These questions were used to develop a problem-solving model of textbook design. Textbooks that teach evoke learner activities designed to achieve contemporary cognitive goals. Suggestions for using textbooks to help solve…

Describes a method for isolating factors that influence the ability of a reader to comprehend the message of an illustration, and explains a model that is constructed from these factors to highlight potential problem stages in an author's design of an illustration. The model is based on data from comprehension trials with college students. (17…

Principles of W. Kintsch's reading comprehension model (1978, 1980) were used to revise an expository text. Two experiments with 170 undergraduates and 125 Air Force recruits indicated that the principled revision conveyed the author's intentions better than the original text, suggesting the model's use for text improvement. (SLD)