Design of Text Comprehension Activities with RETUDISAuth

Abstract

The cognitive psychological approach in text comprehension suggests that the internal variables of the reader hold a primary role in text comprehension, such as his personal goals, interests and pre-existing knowledge. However, cognitive science does not ignore the influence of the text form, in which factors such as text cohesion and logical coherence of facts presented have been proved to be significant elements that facilitate its comprehension (DeCorte et al., 1982). Recent discussions, directions and research results on text comprehension concern the structural analysis of science texts and cognitive aspects of text elements, such as causal relationships between text elements. Different studies on text comprehension have focused their interest on the sentence structure presented by the text (Brown & Day, 1983; Kintsch, 1998). Sentence structure of a text could be organized on the basis of hierarchy in order to allow the importance of sentences in the text to be revealed (Van Dijk, & Kintsch, 1983). In approaching text comprehension, researchers examine issues that focus on assisting comprehension through text summarization (Brown & Day, 1983) by improving text coherence (McNamara, 1996; Kintsch, 1998; Graesser & Tipping, 1999) or assisting the design of the text form and text activities (Baudet & Denhiere, 1992). Text comprehension theory of Baudet & Denhiere, supports that readers build mental representations of information contained in the text during the comprehension process. Primary role should be attributed to the understanding of cognitive categories such as entity, state, event and action as well as temporal and causal relationships connecting these structures (Leon & Penalba, 2002). This consideration deals with text comprehension as the attribution of meanings to causal and temporal connections between occurrences in the text. Furthermore, the organization and structure of cognitive representation should involve three system types: relational system, transformational system and teleological system and should be examined on micro and macro-levels (Baudet & Denhiere, 1992). The design of the structure of text activities is important in order to enhance learning in an educational system. In order to make the information in such activities available to target users (students, teachers, researchers, authors, educators) new efforts have emerged to bring together novel methodologies and technologies. Authoring such activities demands an authoring system which involves knowledge acquisition, design process and managing a large amount of complex information. Authoring tools offer the appropriate structure and guide authors to