Learners often insufficiently monitor their comprehension, which results in overconfident judgments of learning and underachievement. In the 3 present experiments, we investigated whether insufficient comprehension monitoring is due in part to the fact that learners are not sufficiently aware of the benefit of comprehension monitoring and thus…

University students' understanding of photosynthesis was examined in a large introductory biosciences class. The focus of this study was to first examine the conceptions of photosynthesis among students in class and then to investigate how a certain type of text could enhance students' understanding of photosynthesis. The study was based on pre-…

Facilitating students' acquisition of higherorder thinking skills is imperative in the 21st century. Although some types of text have been shown to enhance higherorder thinking, the effects of many novel forms of text have yet to be investigated. As such, the purpose of the present study was to explore the extent to which a relatively novel form…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of Promoting Acceleration of Comprehension and Content Through Text intervention implemented with 11th-grade students enrolled in U.S. History classes. Using a within-teacher randomized design, the study was conducted in 41 classes (23 treatment classes) with 14 teachers providing the…

Prior knowledge is a very important part of teaching and learning, as it affects how instructors and students interact with the learning materials. In general, tests are used to assess students' prior knowledge. Nevertheless, conventional testing approaches usually assign only an overall score to each student, and this may mean that students are…

Poems are usually expressed with elaborate rhetoric techniques, which make them hard to be understood. In this study, a cross-text annotation sharing mechanism is proposed to help students comprehend poetry by creating and sharing individual annotations. Furthermore, relevant annotations among various texts can be retrieved to stimulate and help…

The authors tested whether students can be taught to better understand conventional representations in diagrams, photographs, and other visual representations in science textbooks. The authors developed a teacher-delivered, workbook-and-discussion-based classroom instructional method called Conventions of Diagrams (COD). The authors trained 1…

The main goal of this study was to explore whether the use of multimedia in genetics instruction contributes more to students' knowledge and comprehension than other instructional modes. We were also concerned with the influence of different instructional modes on the retention of knowledge and comprehension. In a quasi-experimental design, four…

This study investigated the impact of prior knowledge, writing task, and hypertext format on university students' comprehension of multisource hypertext. Fifty-two students categorized as having high or low prior knowledge studied hypertext consisting of seven component texts on the topic of social influence. Some students were given a summary…

This investigation was designed to determine the influence of metaphorical priming on students' comprehension of issues and concepts pertaining to the U.S. Constitution when students studied the subject matter in a problem-based hypermedia instructional system. Sixty-five high school seniors studied the system for 5 days after receiving relevant,…

We study the comprehension of a multimedia technical document about gear functioning by young pupils. The research is focused on the effect of three factors on the construction of a mental model: illustration format (animated versus static) signaling cues (presence versus absence) learner-control of information delivery (three rhythms of…