Comprehension: Of What the Reader Sees of What the Author Says.

One of the major assumptions of recent reading research has been that what the reader sees in the text plays as heavily in deteriming comprehension as does what the author says in the text. Although most researchers have tended to infer the reader's contributions by noting the differences between text structure and recall structures, there have been efforts to develop tools to quantify what the reader sees in the text. These efforts began with attention to a text's formal structure as the reader sees it and to the world knowledge of the reader presumed by the text. Four behavioral measures have been proposed for approaching text as a product of readers' perceptions: having readers mark off "idea units" in the text to determine where and how readers organize texts; rating these idea units as important/unimportant to the author's main points; recording the immediate recalls of what has been read; and rating the importance of propositions ensuing from dependency analyses. Research dependent on these measures has begun, using college students as "expert readers"; and the interrelationships among the data suggest interesting connections between the manner in which students perceive text structure and the structure of their comprehension. (RL)