Effects of text structures on interest and memory in expository texts

The purpose of the study was to examine the effects of expository-text structures on interest and memory. Three methods of structuring texts used in the study were detailing, contextualizing, and questioning strategies. Students in grades 6 and 7 participated in the study. Two experiments were conducted. In the experiment 1, a within-subject design was used to investigate differences in text interests among different forms of texts. In the experiment 2, a between-subject design was used to investigate the effects of the text- structuring strategies on text comprehension and memory as well as text interest. Results of the experiment 1 showed that students selected contextualized texts as the most interesting. The reason was that students felt contextualized texts practically relevant to their real lives. In addition, texts constructed by using the strategies showed significantly higher levels of interest than the base text where no strategies were applied. However, in the experiment 2, no significant differences in text interest were found among the different forms of texts. In addition, scores on the text comprehension and memory tests were significantly higher in the base and questioning-strategy texts than in the other two forms of texts. Especially, the lowest performance was found in the contextualized texts. The results of the study provide practical implications on how to structure expository texts commonly used in school to enhance motivation and learning outcomes. Specifically, the results suggested that it would be the most desirable to construct text contents so as to create cognitive conflicts to readers, when text interest, comprehension, and memory are all considered. Keywords: text interest, expository text, text-structuring strategies An individual's interest in text contents influences not only their motivation to read the text, but also how well they comprehend it (Hidi, 1990; Krapp, Hidi, & Renninger, 1992; Shiefele, 1992). Interest brings about active learning by encouraging learners to be highly engaged in learning. At the same time, it affects learning outcomes by making learning processes more meaningful. The purpose of the study was to examine the effects of methods used to structure expository texts on text interest and comprehension.