Educable retarded (64) and nonretarded (64) subjects (mean age 15 years) heard two stories. After each story, performance was assessed on recall and comprehension. All Ss were randomly assigned to one of four treatments: (1)knowledge (Ss were told concepts critical to processing each story); (2)purpose statements (Ss were guided in organizing…

The study examined the effects of an advance organizer on the learning and retention of facts and concepts obtained from a sound film by educable mentally retarded (N=30) and regular children (N=30) in a mainstreamed secondary public school class. Also examined was the interaction between the advance organizer and ability levels of the Ss. Results…

Two experiments investigated to what extent schema activation is involved in any facilitative effect that headings may have on multiple-choice test performance following the reading of a passage. In the first experiment, 1,116 college students read a 1,760-word passage on human sexuality with headings either present or absent. An analysis of the…

The paper reports on a study of Braille learning in which subjects (N=96) were provided with information about the structure of the Braille alphabet and expressly instructed to use that information during learning. A previous experiment had found that merely providing subjects with information about Braille alphabet structure had no effect on…

To discover if narrative analogies of scientific mechanisms would help readers to comprehend passages describing those mechanisms, four such passages were extracted from an encyclopedia. These original passages were written in expository style and constituted the expository condition. For the narrative condition, simple narrative analogies of…

A study involving 105 undergraduates assessed the value of testing as a means of increasing, rather than simply monitoring, learning. Results indicate that fill-in-the-blank and items requiring student inferences were more effective, respectively, than multiple-choice tests and verbatim items in furthering student learning. (TJH)

The purpose of the eight studies reported in this paper was two-fold: to identify some of the relationships that exist between the unique properties of diagrams and various aspects of cognitive processes and learning, and, subsequently, to derive principles from these relationships that would direct the design and use of diagrams in the classroom.…

Recent advances have been made in facilitating implementation of Ausubel's advance organizer strategy. One reason Ausubel's approach has not been widely adopted is its lack of specificity about how to relate what is to be learned to what has already been assimilated within the cognitive structure. The use of subsumptive sequencing, coordinate…

A study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of using advance organizers in instruction at the graduate level. Participants were 218 graduate students in research methodology courses. Fifty-four students were enrolled in sections in which advance and post organizers were used; 164 were enrolled in sections in which this type of instruction…

Research was conducted concerning the efficacy of advance organizers and structured overviews in aiding student recall. The research was modeled on a process described by J.R. Platt that involves refining experiments and testing alternative hypotheses. Four studies that gradually refined experimental error were conducted on the effects of advance…

Four different methods for attending to a lecture were studied: listening, listening with an outline, note-taking, and note-taking with an outline. Each method was designed to influence the learner's level of processing and, therefore, to effect the encoding and retrieval of information from a lecture. In addition, the effects of no review or…

This study investigated the assumption that students use instructional objectives as advance organizers. This assumption, developed by D. Ausubel (1968), is appealing to instructors, but has been difficult to test experimentally. Participants in this study were 8 teachers from 4 different ethnic groups applying the design in 2 lessons for 4…

This study tested the common assumption that lists of instructional objectives (LIOs) presented at the start of a lesson are used as advance organizers (AOs). Because traditional research designs have yielded conflicting results, an alternative design was used that sought to falsify the necessary association between the objectives and their use…

A unit on animals was taught to 64 preschool children (44 in an experimental group and 20 in a control group). Children in the experimental group were taught nine major concepts over four levels of abstraction (designated as superordinate, intermediate, subordinate, or particular levels). Each concept was presented by means of an advance organizer…

A study investigated the effect on reading comprehension of using semantic impressions as a previewing activity to provide an overall impression of a story's structure. Subjects, 31 eighth grade remedial reading students from a suburban junior high school, were divided into two groups: a treatment group that received semantic impressions as a…