Three consecutive experiments examined the effect of offering college students performance-contingent points toward their final course grade under various combinations of knowledge of correct response and rules with examples of how to perform the task. Students who were offered points and received rules with examples scored lower on an immediate…

Two hypotheses about how organizational signals influence text recall were tested with 274 college students who read and recalled a text with or without signals. Results are consistent with the hypothesis that organizational signals induce readers to change their text-processing strategies. (Author/SLD)

The functions of blocking text with horizontal rules and providing headings of different types are discussed. Headings may be encoded or function as access structures, while blocking segments text and provides retrieval cues. These issues were tested in two experiments. College students read a 2000-word passage. In the first experiment, no…