At present, instructional designers have identified no student performances which economically and validly demonstrate an understanding of a passage of connected discourse. This study uses the Schank-Abelson model of conceptual processing (1977) to identify behaviors required for the construction of an adequate internal representation of a text message. The behaviors (construction of links relating text information) were used to identify those students who understand text from those who do not. / In an experimental study, a target sentence was embedded in full text, in beginning disrupted text, in end disrupted text and in a set of disjunct sentences. College students read the experimental materials and then responded to a test probing variations in the internal representation of the target sentence. Results show that a sentence embedded in full text is represented by links to defined types of text information, while the same sentence embedded in a set of disjunct sentences is represented only by sentence syntax links. Thus, the test does identify student performances that occur when connected discourse is understood. / Results also show that reading text with different kinds of disruptions caused systematic variations in the representation of a sentence. Such a finding suggests that reading difficulties may influence the representation of some kinds of information (text links) more than other kinds. Students were most likely to construct causal links. Causal links were found to be prerequisite to the adequate representation of all other kinds of text links. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 42-08, Section: A, page: 3572. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1981.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74590 |
| Contributors | DYRESON, MARGARET MCCLANE., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 199 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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