The purpose of this study is to identify the amounts of college students` cognitive capacity usage during reading the text devised according to the surface structure (level of difficulity, title), and then to offer the rationale about the effective me...
The purpose of this study is to identify the amounts of college students` cognitive capacity usage during reading the text devised according to the surface structure (level of difficulity, title), and then to offer the rationale about the effective methods to organize and construct the text which matches with student`s ability to learn. For the purpose, there are two hypotheses in this study: one is the relationship between the difficulty of surface structure of text and student`s cognitive capacity usage, the other is the relationship of presentation of more adequate title for understanding and recall of text to the student`s cognitive capacity usage.
To test these hypotheses experimentally, in the first experiment forty teacher training course students were assigned randomly two conditions of text structure: Easy syntatic passage and difficult one. The titles of used passages are "The Work of ants", and "Virus". Those passages were used as the main task. The response to table-tapping was used as the secondary task. In the second experiment the subjects were seventy students enrolled in sections of the teacher training course. None of these subjects participated in the first experiment. They were assigned randomly three conditions: Title, non-title, not relevant to the title. The used passages are "Making and Flying a Kite", "Light Waves and Plant Growth", and "Scientific Theory." These were used as the main task. The second task was the same as in experiment 1. In the two experiments the subjects sat at a table with the text booklet in front of them, and were instructed: "Your primary objective is to carefully read the text you can later answer questions about it. Your secondary task is to response to the table-tapping by raising your hand as quickly as possible." The results were coped with the ANOVA.
Conclusions derived from the results and discussions are as follows:
1. When the subjects read the easier passage in the surface structure of text, they showed up less cognitive capacity usage.
2. In the passage which the title has more effect on comprehension and recall of text, the presentation of title influened then to comprehend and recall the passage, but it did not influence the amounts of cognitive capacity usage.
3. The findings also suggest that the surface structure as well as the content structure of text influeces the amounts of cognitive capacity usage during reading.