THIS IS A SHANNON AWARD PROVIDING PARTIAL SUPPORT FOR THE RESEARCH PROJECTS THAT FALL SHORT OF THE ASSIGNED INSTITUTE'S FUNDING RANGE BUT ARE IN THE MARGIN OF EXCELLENCE. THE SHANNON AWARD IS INTENDED TO PROVIDE SUPPORT TO TEST THE FEASIBILITY OF THE APPROACH; DEVELOP FURTHER TESTS AND REFINE RESEARCH TECHNIQUES; PERFORM SECONDARY ANALYSIS OF AVAILABLE DATA SETS; OR CONDUCT DISCRETE PROJECTS THAT CAN DEMONSTRATE THE PI'S RESEARCH CAPABILITIES OR LEAD ADDITIONAL WEIGHT TO AN ALREADY MERITORIOUS APPLICATION. THE APPLICATION BELOW IS TAKEN FROM THE ORIGINAL DOCUMENT SUBMITTED BY THE PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR. Increased difficulty in comprehension is often associated with superior problem-solving abilities that appear to be dependent on a sophisticated situation model of the domain under consideration. However, precise delineations of the processes contributing to this model are scarce. Mannes proposed the reinstatement-and-integration (R&I) strategy as one that may explain how comprehension difficulty fosters the development of a reader's situation model. According to this strategy, when readers encounter a familiar topic during the reading of an expository text, they reinstate in memory the original context in which it was learned and attempt to integrate the current and original learning contexts. Context has been used to refer to a multitude of characteristics of a learning environment, including the learner's physical surroundings and even their emotional state. Here, context is limited to an aspect of the reader's cognitive context. Specifically, the context for a newly learned concept consists of the other concepts that were concurrently active in the reader's memory when that concept was encountered. The proposed research will define boundary conditions guiding the use of the strategy. Many of the proposed studies use similar methods. First, subjects study one of two different, informationally equivalent (i.e., containing sentences communicating the same propositions organized differently), outlines providing the reader with a perspective on the to- be-read target text domain. This is the original learning context. Then subjects read the target text. This is the current learning context. For some, the original and current contexts will be similar in perspective, resulting in the same memories being concurrently active during outline and during text studying. For others, the original and current contexts will differ resulting in increased comprehension difficulty. Experiment 1 investigates whether the situation models hypothesized to result from the R&I strategy co-exist with superior problem-solving abilities, Experiments 2 and 3 identify the nature of the material that is reinstated from the original context. The remaining experiments investigate the role of individual differences, task demands, and text genre on the use of the R&l strategy. Predictions from competing hypotheses are contrasted with those of the R&I strategy. Results from these studies will be used to specify one of the strategies used in the complex task of text comprehension and this will be incorporated in an existing cognitive simulation of text comprehension. The simulation can be used to predict the most likely cognitive outcome of different combinations of learning materials BEFORE they are used in the classroom.
