Designing learnable texts: The effectiveness of revisions based on a text processing model

Revising texts to improve learning has produced successful revisions but the reasons why they were successful has not been made clear. In this review, we describe the text revision strategy derived from the text processing model of Kintsch by Britton and Gülgöz (1991). Three principles were developed and implemented on natural texts to make them more memorable. The texts used in different experiments varied in content and language and the studies employed different measures of learning and reading time. The emerging pattern from the reviewed studies is that revised texts that add the missing connections to the text, lead to better learning, especially when readers lack inference-making skills, domain-specific knowledge or motivation for cognitive effort.