Content-area novices develop rules as to what types of information (e.g., definitions, facts, equations) are important in texts (Dee-Lucas & Larkin, 1988). The study reported here indicates that these rules influence text learning. Experts and novices read and recalled science texts. Reading times and recall for different types of content were compared for the two groups. Results indicate that novices’ importance rules function as part of novices’ control schema during reading, influencing their attentional processes and the resulting representation formed for the text. This was evident in qualitative differences between experts and novices in their attentional patterns and text recall. The study also found that the number of passage readings and the passage topic have a greater influence on the reading times of exports, but both groups adjust processing time according to the hierarchical level of the passage content. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for novices learning from texts.