An Empirical Method of Assessing Topic Familiarity in Reading Comprehension Research

While numerous studies have shown that prior knowledge and topic familiarity affect comprehension and usability of a text, few researchers account for readers' topic familiarity in studies that investigate other reading comprehension variables. This research note briefly reviews the literature...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inBritish educational research journal Vol. 17; no. 4; pp. 353 - 360
Main Authors Spyridakis, Jan H., Wenger, Michael J.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1991
Carfax Publishing Company
Taylor & Francis
Carfax Publishing Co
Subjects
Cognitive space
Curriculum subjects: programmes and methods
Educational Research
Educational sciences
Familiarity
Health care outcome assessment
Higher Education
Knowledge
Memory
Prior Learning
Reader Text Relationship
Reading Comprehension
Reading research
Reading, writing
Research methods
Research Problems
Scientific method
Teaching methods
Text Processing (Reading)
Usability
USA
Task Training
Incidental Learning
Knowledge
Reading Comprehension
Evaluative Behaviour
Metaanalysis
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Summary:While numerous studies have shown that prior knowledge and topic familiarity affect comprehension and usability of a text, few researchers account for readers' topic familiarity in studies that investigate other reading comprehension variables. This research note briefly reviews the literature on the effect of prior knowledge and text familiarity on document comprehension and usability and discusses current methods for assessing subjects' topic familiarity. An empirically based method for effectively assessing subjects' topic familiarity is presented.
Bibliography:istex:6582C51E6E78AA80D2BF863D7B946550F1D68DD1
ark:/67375/WNG-Z0LPRFZW-5
ArticleID:BERJ1306
ObjectType-Article-2
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-1
content type line 14
ISSN:0141-1926
1469-3518
DOI:10.1080/0141192910170405