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…

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…

A total of 150 undergraduate students randomly assigned to five experimental groups studied ten paragraphs with questions interspersed at different locations in the text. Performance on incidental items was significantly lower (p < .05) in the question before (QB) than in the question after (QA), question before and after (QBA), and the…

Advanced organizers produced two distinct effects--subsumption of related material and abstraction of incidental concepts. (RB)

Compared student retention of information in foreign-language videos in two advance organizer conditions. Participants were 67 college students enrolled in five sections of a beginning-level French course. Findings were interpreted as supportive of the premise that it is significantly better to incorporate an advance organizer with video than not.…

College undergraduates read stories from one of two directed perspectives or no directed perspective. An idea's significance in terms of the assigned perspective affected both initial learning and recall one week later. Schemata, or conceptual frameworks, were assumed to aid in memory and retrieval. (Author/GDC)

The effects of intervening synthesis/review sheets, periodic practice worksheets, a combination of review and practice, and an advance organizer on learning from prose text were investigated. Using 161 college students as subjects, the study increasingly added learner activities to an instructional unit (Lamberski's revised edition of the Dwyer…

Subjects in the first part of this two-part study (56 undergraduates) read a 24-frame text on computer programming that was presented either in logical or in random order. The results of this experiment showed that the subjects given an advance organizer in the random order presentation performed better on a posttest than did control subjects (no…

A study examined whether pictures presented in advance of reading a text (advance organizers) as compared to pictures presented after reading a text (postorganizers) would significantly enhance the reader's retention of the text's content. Sixty college students rated their familiarity with six topics, then read materials presented on the three…

This study sought to determine: (1) if an advance organizer could establish a function concept as a subsumer for new concepts; and (2) if an established subsumer would facilitate learning, transfer, and retention of concepts on lives and scope. Students in a remedial college mathematics class were subjects of the study. (Author/LMO)

The effects of graphic preorganizers (structured overviews) and prereading vocabulary instruction upon literal (lower level) and inferential/evaluative (upper level) comprehension was studied, using six sections of college students enrolled in a developmental reading and study skills course. The class sections were randomly assigned to use either…

An investigation was conducted comparing six college students who used cognitive mapping to two control groups, each with five students, who used a self-selected study strategy and reading. Cognitive mapping is a study strategy that displays the meaning of text through a diagram depicting the interconnectedness of the ideas in the text. Results…

In three immediately succeeding trials, 45 young adults named 50 pictures of objects as rapidly as possible; word retrieval latencies were measured for each item. Before each trial, one experimental group was given information as to the word frequency (WF) level of the items' names. The other experimental group was given information as to the…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 30 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) effects of graphic organizers, textual organization, and reading comprehension level on recall of expository prose; (2) the effect of metaphor on the reading…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 12 titles deal with the following topics: advance organizers; a comparison of the effectiveness and efficiency of behavioral objectives and sample tests; anaphoric nominal substitution and its relationship to reading…