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 presents five sets of studies evaluating particular processing models and optimization techniques to improve reading comprehension and retention, including the use of schemata in the acquisition and transfer of knowledge, knowledge acquisition from newspaper stories, the integration of knowledge from text, configural effects in memory, and text annotation as a technique for facilitating knowledge integration. The last section of the report discusses ten conclusions, among which are that presenting new information in well-learned structural organizations can facilitate learning that information, that eliminating redundancy and irrelevant commentary from newspaper stories facilitates assimilation and retention of important facts, and that annotating texts with references to related facts that have occurred in previous texts facilitates general inferential reasoning from the texts. (AEA)