Imagine that on some unlucky weekday morning your coffee machine breaks down. For many of us, notably the authors of this chapter, this would be a serious problem. One way of solving this urgent problem is by physically fumbling with the broken machine, trying to fix it by using problem-solving heuristics or sheer trial and error. As an alternative, text would come to the rescue. You could read the manual that came with the machine. You could look in a book on household repairs. You could also consult the Internet. When you pursue any of these latter options, you must be able to comprehend the text and apply what you have learned. This chapter explores the factors that predict your success in solving problems such as the broken coffee machine after reading a text.

Whenever texts are successfully used to solve a problem, the solver must accurately represent both the problem and the messages presented in the texts. A text representation is a cognitive representation that has some reference to elements, features, or structural patterns in the explicit text. Many factors contribute to the construction of text representations. To put it simply, two classes of factors are properties of the text (such as its organization into topics, subtopics, and sentences) and properties of the reader (such as domain-specific knowledge and general reading skill). One of the central assumptions of this chapter is that text representations constrain problem solving.