An investigation on how the Malaysian beginning economics students cognitively process chapter one of a microeconomics textbook: Implications for the teaching of reading and rewriting the chapter

Textbook authors and publishers have been criticized for producing "inconsiderate" textbooks which do not provide students with a structure that aids learning. Traditionally, they used readability formulas which do not usually concern themselves with concept development nor reader's schema. Recently, researchers have been studying the relationships between a text's structure and a reader's schema.;Implications for teaching assimilation encoding strategies in Malaysian classrooms and revising the economics textbook based on an expository problem-solving paradigm are proposed. Policy implications for composing texts and instruction in Malaysian schools are considered.;This study attempted to explore the interaction between a reader's prior knowledge (schema) and the text structure influence on text comprehension. These two variables may be responsible for the relatively poor performance of otherwise highly selected Malaysian economics students in the national examinations. The subjects included four students, two of whom had no background knowledge in economics and two of whom were relatively informed about the concepts in the chapter. The design involved first, an in-depth analysis of chapter one of a microeconomics textbook. Text analysis was based on Meyer's (1985) structural analysis of text. It included an overall analysis of the chapter, and a paragraph by paragraph dissection of the text. Second, the students were asked to perform four tasks. The first task was to identify the main idea of each paragraph and to explain how they chose each other. Secondly, students discussed six text features questions. Thirdly, the students discussed the overall chapter. Finally, the students were administered a problem-solving test. All data were analysed and compared to determine subjects' use and understanding of the text structure, paragraph structure, encoding strategies, the influence of their background knowledge on their comprehension of the text, and performance in the test. The results indicated that poor test performance could be explained because the students failed to recognize the expository text structure and their lack of the use of an assimilation encoding strategy. It appears that students used a narrative schema analysis and an addition encoding strategy. The results were explained in terms of Mayer's learning paradigms.