Studying Strategies and Their Implications for Textbook Design

Publisher Summary This chapter presents the notion that the demands of studying from text can be affected in beneficial ways by changing the characteristics of the text itself. The chapter presents some of the major dimensions of studying—clarifying the criteria for studying, focusing attention on the relevant text segments, and engaging in high payoff encoding activities—to lend support to this notion,. These dimensions of studying are merged with four qualities of text—structure, coherence, unity, and audience appropriateness—that appear to affect how well students can read and understand it. Some of the reasons why would think high-quality text helps studying are (1) criteria for studying will be clearer to students because the titles, headings and topic sentences help the student identify the questions that the text is answering and (2) focusing attention will be easier because each idea unit in the regular text is important, in that it contributes to an answer and/or a question. The idea units that have a high probability of being nonessential are clearly marked as such by being in a box. The hierarchical structure of the text and high degree of unity make it easy and efficient for students to locate a specific text unit. Entire chunks of irrelevant text can be easily identified and skipped over.