The efficient reader constructs tentative hypotheses about the meaning of the text that has been read and about the content yet to come. The hypotheses remain tentative until all related information has been accounted for. The reader then constructs a model that considers all of the details in a text. If a promising interpretation fails to account for some aspect of the text, the reader can accept the interpretation in spite of its flaws or reject it and search for other interpretations. Research in schema theory as a framework for recall of information in text has lead to two views of text comprehension, one holding that it is a top-down or conceptually driven process, another proposing that reading is a bottom-up or data driven process. Experiments indicate that there are differences in cognitive style among children, based on how impulsively or reflectively they process information and on how much they rely on either top-down or bottom-up processing. It is important that a reader develop the ability to differentiate important from unimportant information in text. Use of appropriate schemata becomes the basis for recalling information that is most relevant to the central idea in a text. (Author/FL)