ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses the strategies that students used to regulate activation of prior knowledge in the split focus situation. Split focus refers to the fact that students need to focus both on understanding what the text says and on performing operations that produce learning. The chapter presents an overview of characteristics of readers, texts, tasks, and settings that influence reading and studying text. It also addresses the issue of self-regulation. The chapter reports an experiment and the results that shed informative light on self-regulation mechanisms. It investigates text processing by adult readers in a situation that is relatively new for them. The study was motivated by a similar paradox. The ability to understand narrative texts develops earlier in life than ability to deal with expository texts and scientific texts are notoriously difficult to comprehend. The context of reading specifies the physical and social setting of the reading activity.
