An experiment with 109 college students examined the effects of advance organizers and repeating a lecture on test performance. Advance organizers that integrated subtopic information (linear and matrix organizers) increased recall of subtopic information but more general organizers (conventional) aided overall recall, especially general topic…

The most common criticism of advance organizers is that their definition and instructions for construction are vague. Ausubel's books and research articles offer a precise operational definition. Construction can only be described generally because it varies according to nature of learning material, age of learner, and learner's degree of…

College subjects were given either no prepassage, a thematic prepassage, or a topic sentence prepassage followed by an ambiguous passage in either superordinate or coordinate context. The thematic prepassage facilitated performance on a rigorously scored free-recall measure and a multiple-choice measure. Superordinate contextual organization…

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)

Describes a note taking and teaching strategy designed to help students think during lectures and assimilate material in a synthesized form via small group and written recapitulation. (MKM)

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)

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…

The effects of instructions for using advance organizers upon the learning and retention of new information were examined. The special instructions explained an organizer's function and directed students to use the advance organizer. An advance organizer treatment, an advance organizer with special instruction treatment, and a no advance organizer…

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…

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…

In the generative model of learning with understanding, reading comprehension occurs when readers actively construct meaning for text. On two experiments with 488 sixth graders, learning time was held constant across all treatments. The combination of inserted paragraph headings and instructions to generate sentences about paragraphs approximately…

Subjects read a textual passage encompassing hierarchically related topics. A structural outline presented in advance of reading the text facilitated reproductive recall of facts. The recall of specific facts was superior to that of general facts, implying an experimental demand to be precise in learning and recalling specific factual material.…

Subjects listened to a short science passage one, two, or three times. Overall amount recalled increased with number of presentations, but recall of conceptual principles and related information increased sharply with repetition, whereas recall of formal equations and concrete analogies did not. Advance organizers functioned similarly. (Author/PN)

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)