That's Important But is it Interesting? Two Factors in Text Processing

This paper examines the characteristics of different text types used in natural school settings and relates some of these characteristics to children's ability to recall the texts. Our findings suggest that while interesting information in narratives also tends to be important, the same is not true for expositions. For one type of exposition (mixed texts) where narrative elements were included in the expositions, interesting and important information was found to be unrelated; in the other type of exposition, where no intrusions occurred, the material was generally not considered very interesting. These differences in text types were found to be related to differential recall by children.

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