College students who read material with advance organizers presented either before the passage or interspersed in the text did not recall significantly more information than did a control group presented with the text only. (MM)

Investigates the impact of underlining and adjunct questioning in text recall for fifth grade students. Results suggest that for 10 year-old readers adjunct post questions and underlining may hinder performance. (RAO)

Using 40 university students, the author studied the effect of a summary on recall of a reading passage. Four conditions were compared: beginning summary on same page as main passage, beginning summary on separate page, end summary, and no summary. Subjects using end and separate page summaries demonstrated greater recall. (SJL)

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…

This report provides an overview of concept and principle-learning studies and traces the theoretical basis for schema theory, which asserts that all knowledge is assimilated into a general cognitive framework. The procedures of an original study are described, which was designed to test the hypothesis that the inclusion of a "domain…

Reports the results of a study of 10th grade students that showed their comprehension improved when slash marks were used to divide the text into meaningful phrases. (AEA)

Finds that advance organizers and level of test anxiety had no effect on test performance of mildly handicapped high school students who took a learning test after viewing a film. (SR)

The existing literature on reading comprehension instruction is organized and reviewed. The authors question whether explicit training to improve comprehension or monitoring strategies should be offered, since these behaviors improve with maturity and experience and in the absence of any apparent training, but conclude that it is possible that…

Reviews the guidelines for the construction of an advance organizer as proposed by David Ausubel and examines why the term has so many possible definitions. (FL)

Focuses on what sixth-grade students know about the organizational features of prose and whether the use of specific organizational patterns (top-level structures) facilitates written recall of expository prose. (HOD)

This article summarizes the findings of research studies designed to improve the comprehension of expository text for students with learning disabilities. Twenty-nine studies were located that met the inclusion criteria. Interventions gleaned from the review were categorized as content enhancement (i.e., advance and graphic organizers, visual…

Contrary to expectation, subjects given a passage with neither paragraph cues nor an advance organizer recalled better than subjects given paragraph cues but no advance organizer. (RB)

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…

An experiment was conducted to test the effects of isolating and identifying generalities and instances in written prose instruction on student performance. Eighty college students were given either a typical chapter from a college textbook that included a summary, the same chapter with the summary removed, a modified version of the chapter in…

High school juniors and seniors participated in three studies of the effects of a thematic organizer on passage comprehension. Comprehension was measured using a cloze procedure in the first study and using a passage-reproduction task in the second and third studies. A thematic organizer (material presented to provide a context for the passage)…