ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the parallel between reading in functional contexts and the processes involved in problem solving. Most of the text-processing research in the 70s and 80s did not examine goals beyond reading to comprehend an author's message. Toward the end of the 90s, researchers called for a systematic consideration of the importance of goals in the processing of texts. McCrudden and Schraw's Goal-Focusing Model has proposed that "relevance instructions" lead to goals that affect the allocation of cognitive effort on specific text segments. Task-oriented reading refers to situations in which a reader reads one or more texts while knowing in advance that s/he has to perform a task for which the texts are a crucial and available source of information. Inquiry tasks have been shown to affect integration and transformation of text content. Self-regulated learning views the learner as actively and autonomously controlling and evaluating progress to a learning goal.
