An investigation was conducted to ascertain the effects of the structured overview on both the short-term and long-term comprehension of average and below average readers. The subjects were 143 college students classified as average or below average readers and randomly assigned to either a structured overview (65) or a control group (78). Both…

This report documents a series of studies on how undergraduate students learn from and reason with textual information. The studies described were undertaken to produce models that could serve as the basis for designing computer systems capable of structuring and presenting text material in optimal formats. Divided into sections, the report…

Ideas to be understood and to be remembered must be organized. To organize ideas the reader must recognize the relationship of the parts of the ideas, to one another and to the whole. The reader with no orderly set of the ideas presented on the printed page cannot carry on a dialogue with the author and profit from the reading experience. What did…