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…

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)

The purpose of this study was to isolate factors responsible for the discrepant results reported in the advanced organizer literature, and to identify processes children employ when attempting to recall connected verbal materials. The subjects were 64 middle-class children randomly selected from a local school system. An equal number of male and…

This study demonstrated a reliable method of determining the attributes of prose materials on an imagery-concreteness scale, and evaluated the effects of an advance organizer and a learning passage on learning and retention when the attributes of these passages are defined on a concrete-imagery continuum. (Author/PN)

Retention of prose is examined as it is affected by (1) outlines as advanced organizers; (2) preexperimental familiarity with the material; and (3) text genre. Findings are discussed in the context of current theories in cognitive psychology, particularly those of structure, organization, and representation of knowledge and prose. (Author/GK)

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…

Pupils studied a short passage in one of four conditions: control, passage with title, passage with headings written as statements, and passage with headings written as questions. Passages with headings were recalled significantly better, both in immediate and delayed conditions. Low ability students profited most from the "question" headings.…

Providing specific instructions on reading material to be retained or to be forgotten induced college students to study all the material at a slower pace. A second experiment indicated that increased reading time was necessary for retention of the emphasized sentences. (Author/GDC)

This study has three purposes: (1) to determine whether the graphic organizer (a schematic representation of text structure using key vocabulary terms) could be used to compensate for the effects of a passage organized with a description top-level structure; (2) to explore the effectiveness of providing students differing in reading ability with…

In an analysis of a processing activities model of memory applied to connected discourse, 206 college students assigned to eight conditions in two studies evidenced significantly greater recall when provided with semantic level tasks than either surface feature analysis or reading control (intentional and incidental) conditions. Additionally,…

A 3 x 3 x 2 factorial design was used with 120 undergraduate subjects to study the effects of question type on learning from prose. A 2,000-word reading passage on geological history was presented, with factual questions on each page. Questions were also presented after the reading activity. When compared to a reading only control group, the short…