1 This article discusses how research in discourse processing can help improve the comprehension of material in textbooks, classrooms, human tutoring, and computer-based training. Improving Comprehension through Discourse Processing Arthur Graesser, Natalie Person, and Xiangen Hu Students rarely acquire a deep understanding of the material they are supposed to learn in their courses. This painful fact is widely acknowledged in the field of education. Students normally settle for shallow knowledge, such as a list of concepts, a handful of facts about each concept, and simple definitions of key terms. What is missing are the deep coherent explanations that organize the shallow knowledge and that fortify the learner for generating inferences, solving problems, reasoning, and applying their knowledge to practical situations. The acquisition of shallow knowledge is unfortunately reinforced by the normal classroom activities and testing formats. Classroom lectures typically are information delivery systems for shallow knowledge. The teachers’ questions in the classroom typically are shallow short-answer questions that require only single words or short phrases in the student response. The format of most examinations consists of multiple choice, true-false, or fill-in-the-blank questions that, once again, tap primarily the shallow knowledge. Given this unfortunate state of affairs, many researchers and teachers in education have been exploring learning environments and pedagogical strategies that promote deep comprehension. The field of discourse processing offers some solutions to the challenge of promoting deep comprehension during learning. The present