This article focuses on the influence of connectives (because, so) and layout (continuous
placement of sentences versus each sentence beginning on a new line) on the quality of students’ mental representations. By using
multiple comprehension tasks, we found that cohesive text features have different effects on each facet of deeper text
comprehension. On local comprehension tasks (i.e. bridging inference questions), all students performed better after reading
history texts containing connectives than after reading texts without these markers. On global comprehension tasks (i.e. sorting
tasks), pre-vocational students performed better when coherence relations were marked, regardless of layout, while pre-un iversity
students did not need connectives as long as texts were presented in a natural, continuous way. These findings indicate that
connectives are an important factor in creating comprehensible texts, in particular for pre-vocational students. Finally, we
conclude there is a mismatch between these findings and the current practice in designing optimal educational texts, at least in
the Netherlands.
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