INDIVIDUAL-DIFFERENCES IN REPROCESSING OF TEXT

This study examined the roles of basic reading processes and prior knowledge in reprocessing of expository text. According to their performance in a decoding and a working memory task, 48 college students were divided into groups of above-average and average readers and either rewrote notes, reread notes, or reread a text. The 3 strategies were equally effective in improving comprehension for text-explicit and text-implicit information, and reading ability and prior knowledge were more predictive for comprehension than was the type of reprocessing activity. Text reprocessing might help average readers to compensate for their lower performance in answering text-implicit questions, whereas above-average readers seem to combine more text information with their knowledge base. Working memory played the major role for comprehending text-implicit information, whereas knowledge was relatively more important for explicit and script-implicit information.