Individual differences in the effectiveness of text cohesion for science text comprehension

• Students demonstrated increased learning from high cohesion science text.
• High cognitive ability was associated with good text comprehension.
• High science self-efficacy was associated with good text comprehension.
• Low dutifulness was associated with poor comprehension of low cohesion text.

The present study examined associations between individual differences and comprehension capabilities of secondary school children when reading texts about science topics of varying levels of cohesion (i.e. low versus high cohesion). We administered measures of learning after reading high and low cohesion texts (defined by repetition of nouns and phrases) to 60 students (31 boys, 29 girls) and measured cognitive ability, facets of conscientiousness, and science self-efficacy. Students achieved better learning from high cohesion text. High cognitive ability was associated with good performance with both texts, whereas low cognitive ability was associated with poor performance on low cohesion text. High science self-efficacy was associated with good performance on both texts, low science self-efficacy was associated with average performance with the texts. Low dutifulness (conscientiousness facet) was associated with poor performance on low cohesion text. These results have significant implications for the design of science textbooks and potential teacher intervention strategies with the aim of improving science education.