ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some problems that occur when one attempts to study the role of knowledge and text processing. These problems include difficulties in assessing knowledge, problems associated with use of the contrastive method, issues related to scoring recall protocols, and the need to determine the interaction between text structure and the effects of knowledge. The first three problems involve pragmatics of research, and the last a problem that is at once both conceptual and methodological. A theoretical marriage of the concerns reflected in expository research focused on the role of text structure and narrative research on the role of knowledge is clearly in order. The questionnaire was to serve as a pretest for the experimental conditions, and subsequently as a posttest to determine improvement as a function of the experimental condition. An important criticism of contrastive research is, of course, that it is basically correlational.
