Advocates the use of reading guides to help journalism students read and analyze textbooks critically. (HOD)

Subjects read a text concerning a new computer programing language, with an advance organizer given either before or after reading. On a recall test, there were different patterns of performance. Results suggested that the locus of the effect was at encoding rather than retrieval. (Author/GDC)

Thirty adults ages 53-85 and 28 adults ages 19-38 were randomly assigned to three groups to read six passages. One group received advance organizers prior to reading, the second got orienting instructions plus advance organizers, and the controls received neither . Orienting instructions significantly helped both age groups and greatly reduced…

The ability of 54 learning-disabled high-school students to monitor their comprehension was compared under three prereading conditions: self-questions only, structured overviews and self-questions, and a control condition. Subjects receiving both the overviews and self-questions were best able to detect errors during reading. (Author/DB)

The influence of organizational cues on story comprehension was investigated for seven and eight year olds (N=44 British primary school students). Subjects were matched in age and decoding skills, but differed in comprehension ability. Results shed light on cognitive control required to select and coordinate information in text. (TJH)

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…

The past 20 years of research into the efficacy of advance organizers has resulted in little empirical support for their use. A primary reason for this lack of strong support is the absence of true objective descriptions and definitions of the organizers used and the concomitant poor control over their derivation and construction. This deficiency…

Ninety-three college students studied prose material about communications. An experiment employing both isolated summaries and a study strategy was conducted to examine how mathemagenic behaviors would facilitate students' comprehension and recall of the prose material they studied. Some students were given material containing interspersed…

A study was conducted to determine: (1) the relationships between prior knowledge and passage recall; (2) the effect of a prereading activity (PReP) on available knowledge; and (3) the effect of the PReP activity on total comprehension scores. The subjects were 161 sixth grade students from a middle class suburban Long Island, New York, public…

After expanding on the definition of advance organizers as proposed by David Ausubel, this paper offers possible reasons for the lack of strong empirical support for the use of the strategy. It then cites examples of the successful use of advance organizers with learners from nursery school through college and in a variety of disciplines. The…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of reader generated questions while studying textbook-type material. One hundred and eight college students were assigned to one of the following treatment conditions: experimenter presented questions before reading, reader generated questions before reading, experimenter presented questions…

College students were given a topically relevant or irrelevant outline and asked to generate propositions about the topics by drawing on existing knowledge prior to studying an instructional text. Results of conceptual clustering analyses suggest that organization was one of the mechanisms by which topical outlines increased meaningful text…

The effectiveness of D. Ausubel's Advance Organizer, an introduction presented before the material to be taught, was tested with 96 mildly retarded adolescents. Results of a three-way analysis of variance indicated a facilitative effect under the written presentation, especially for high-level questions and a negative effect under the oral…

In studies on the effect of advance objectives on readers' comprehension of prose, reliable differences were noted in the areas of the passages students focused upon depending on the presence of objectives and the level of learning they required. No differences were observed in reading comprehension. (JD)

Reviews previous research on advance organizers (introductory text adjuncts intended to provide readers of expository text with a meaningful context within which to process unfamiliar, or difficult, new information). Shows that they inspire significant comprehension increases among readers whose prior knowledge "subsumers" are inadequate to…