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The role of interest and text structure in professional reading
Author(s) -
Spooren Wilbert,
Mulder Monique,
Hoeken Hans
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
journal of research in reading
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.077
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1467-9817
pISSN - 0141-0423
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9817.00048
Subject(s) - reading (process) , psychology , subject (documents) , product (mathematics) , process (computing) , linguistics , mathematics education , computer science , world wide web , philosophy , geometry , mathematics , operating system
Students can be regarded as professional readers: they have to attend to, comprehend and remember the most important information in instructional texts, often about topics they are not readily interested in. Optimising such instructional texts has been the subject of much reading research. This research has shown robust effects for the influence of text structure: information highlighted by a strongly organising structure is retained better than seemingly less important information. Hidi and Baird (1986) suggest that such effects of structure are artefacts, because of the dullness of texts used in such experiments. They argue that readers mainly use interest instead of structure as their guide for attention and learning. In this article three related experiments using Dutch instructional texts are reported. Both interest and text structure were manipulated as within‐item factors, and on‐line as well as off‐line methods were used to measure effects on the reading process and product. The outcomes show no support for the hypothesis of Hidi and Baird: students learn better from texts that are well structured, regardless of the interest of the text or its topic.