Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Readers who self-explain texts aloud understand more from a text and construct better mental models of the content. This study examined the effects of providing self-explanation training on text comprehension, as well as course grades. Effects of prior knowledge and reading skill were also examined in relation to the benefits of self-explaining and self-explanation training. In general, low-knowledge readers gained more from training than did high-knowledge readers.