The present study examined the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and comprehension on a multiple text assessment from the ACT test for college preparedness in which texts are available during question answering. Specifically, it was of interest whether differences in relations would be seen across different question types. Only…

This study examined 57 learners' emotions (i.e., joy, anger, confusion, frustration) as they engaged with scientific content while learning about microbiology with Crystal Island, a game-based learning environment (GBLE). Measures of learners' prior knowledge, in-game text comprehension, facial expressions of emotion, and posttest reading…

A large body of research has outlined how mental models are formed by comprehending texts, yet relatively less work has been conducted in the field of comprehending artworks. Trans-symbolic comprehension (TSC) processes have been theorized to partially account for how mental models are formed across media. The current study tested whether…

Analyzing constructed responses, such as think-alouds or self-explanations, can reveal valuable information about readers' comprehension strategies. The current study expands on the extant work by (1) investigating combinations and patterns of comprehension strategies that readers use and (2) examining the extent to which these patterns relate to…

This study was conducted to better understand the difficulties faced by underprepared college readers, including those enrolled in Developmental Education (DE) programs. The Reading Systems Framework was used as a theoretical motivation. Participants (n = 258) completed a measure of component reading skills (Study Aid and Reading Assessment, word…

Connectives such as "because" and "but" are crucial for signaling coherence relations in discourse. They contribute to a better reading comprehension and, thus, academic performance. The aim of this article is to contribute to our understanding of connective development during teenage years by studying individual differences in…

The present study in French sought to investigate which factors predict irony perception most efficiently. An experiment was developed following three steps. The first two steps focused on the creation of stimuli to be evaluated in the third step. In this last step, participants, whose sociocultural characteristics (gender, age, and level of…

In this study, adults naïve to organic chemistry drew stereoisomers of molecules and explained their drawings. From these explanations, we identified nine strategies that participants expressed during those explanations. Five of the nine strategies referred to properties of the molecule that were explanatorily "irrelevant" to solving the…

The Landscape Model of text comprehension was extended to the comprehension of audiovisual discourse from text and video TV news stories. Concepts from the story were coded for activation after each sequence, creating a matrix of activations that was reduced to a vector of the degree of total activation for each concept. In Study 1, the degree…