Material Appropriate Processing (MAP) researchers suggest that differential processing takes place during reading, depending on the type of text being read. However, MAP research has tended to confound text type (narration vs. exposition) with text readability level. The present research was conducted to clarify the roles of these variables in comprehension and comprehension monitoring. First of all, although narration/exposition comprehension differences remained with text readability held constant, comprehension monitoring differences disappeared. Second, these experiments explored the possibility that accurate comprehension monitoring found with moderately difficult texts is due to the discriminability of the texts from one another and not to text readability per se. That is, these experiments explored whether readers of a set of highly discriminable texts (e.g. texts having widely differing readability scores) monitored their comprehension better than readers of a set of less discriminable texts (e.g. texts having similar readability scores).;Results indicated an interaction between text discriminability and text type. Readers of narration monitored their comprehension more accurately with more widely discriminable texts, while readers of exposition monitored their comprehension more accurately with consistently moderately difficult texts. However, this interaction did not appear consistently. Finally, the optimum effort hypothesis was used to test whether on-line reading tasks would benefit comprehension and comprehension monitoring. Results indicated that such tasks improved comprehension only in some situations, and that they consistently disrupted comprehension monitoring. Conclusions drawn include that comprehension monitoring might be better examined using pretests to guide processing during reading, rather than using on-line reading tasks.
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