The purpose of the present piece is to integrate some current theories of text comprehension with the body of work on metacomprehension, and especially the calibration of comprehension monitoring. This paper explores some important methodological and conceptual issues, inspired by current theories in the text comprehension literature, which suggest that the nature of the texts used for metacomp...

Although a good rational number understanding is of crucial importance for learners’ general maths achievement, many learners have misconceptions about fractions. An often described misconception that fraction’s numerical magnitude increases when its denominator, numerator, or both increase. The present intervention study investigated how robust this is, after specifically been instructed on th...

Random laminations of the disk are the continuous limits of random non-crossing configurations of regular polygons. We provide an expository account on this subject. Initiated by the work of Aldous on the Brownian triangulation, this field now possesses many characters such as the random recursive triangulation, the stable laminations and the Markovian hyperbolic triangulation of the disk. We w...

This project involves developing a reading comprehension curriculum based on the Construction-Integration model (Kintsch, 1998) and implementing a pilot efficacy study in middle-school classrooms. The curriculum (BRAVO) explicitly defines the cognitive processes involved in skilled reading, teaching students how to establish local and global text coherence and use background knowledge to create...

In this paper, I examine the role of intentional and informational structure in enabling a system to generate coherent multi-sentential texts in interactive settings. I review the plan-based model of discourse generation that I and my colleagues have developed, and examine the role of the speaker's communicative plans in generating expository text in an interactive environment. I provide exampl...

This research studies the text genre of message board forums, which contain a mixture of expository sentences that present factual information and conversational sentences that include communicative acts between the writer and readers. Our goal is to create sentence classifiers that can identify whether a sentence contains a speech act, and can recognize sentences containing four different spee...

As students read expository text, comprehension is improved by pausing to answer questions that reinforce the material. We describe an automatic question generator that uses semantic pattern recognition to create questions of varying depth and type for self-study or tutoring. Throughout, we explore how linguistic considerations inform system design. In the described system, semantic role labels...

Introduction Anaphora has an important function in text comprehension. The processes of anaphoric inference are to make local coherence among sentences. The coherence constructed from several variables (e.g. Lee, 1993). The first variable is an anaphora type: noun phrase, pronoun or ellipsis. Another variable is the properties of antecedents: syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic. Yet another varia...

Identifying given and new information within a text has long been addressed as a research issue. However, there has previously been no accurate computational method for assessing the degree to which constituents in a text contain given versus new information. This study develops a method for automatically categorizing noun phrases into one of three categories of givenness/newness, using the tax...