Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A comprehension-based approach to learning assumes that incoming information and background knowledge are integrated to form a mental representation which is subsequently used to incorporate new knowledge. We demonstrate that this approach can indicate when people will learn from instructions. Specifically, we show that a computational model based on the construction-integration theory of comprehension (Kintsch, 1988) can explain and predict how individual users will comprehend help prompts that guide their generation of successful complex commands within an operating system.