Abstract
Theoretical and experimental analysis about the cognitive explanations of text comprehension. At first, they recognize that cognitive psychology can be useful to improve the learning from text. Nevertheless, a experiment is planed considering several methodological precautions that researchers on comprehension reading do not usually take into account. These concern placebo and waiting list groups of control. The question is to assess the effects of two interventions: one called cognitive, and the other metacognitive. The independent variable called generalization (that consists in using text categories), wa the only which had favorable outcome for both experimental conditions, and not only for the metacognitive group, a it was expected. Concerning comprehension, both of the experimental conditions improved, as well a one of the control group. Being this the situation, there arises a general theoretical discussion which points up four aspects about cognitive foundations, nominally: self-inconsistency, exploiting of evident facts, deceptive explanation, and illusory task.
