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)

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…

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…

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…

This investigation tested the effects of a reading method on the ability of delinquent students to retain information. The method used involved a consolidation of advance organizers, student-developed pre-reading questions, establishment of purposes for reading, and the questions "who, what, where, when, why, or how." Eighteen subjects…

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.…

A study explored the effects of prequestions (questions provided prior to reading) and the influence of a prediction strategy upon the amount and types of information recalled by children in grades three through six. Subjects, 188 students in grades three through six who were reading at third grade level or above, read a 900-word expository…

A study tested the effects of using a graphic advance organizer before, during, and after reading on the comprehension of written text. Subjects were 197 sixth-grade students who were assigned to a graphic advance organizer group or a reading-only control group and who were also designated as below-level, at-level, and above-level readers. The…

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

Three experiments examined the effects of outlines prefacing text and headings inserted in the text on the recall of prose by 178 undergraduates. Results indicate that a combination of outlines and headings best benefit readers' recall. Results are discussed from a schema activation perspective. (SLD)

A study was conducted to investigate the compensatory effects of graphic organizers on text organization. Subjects were 114 tenth grade students who read two versions of an expository passage containing identical information but differing in top level structure. The version organized to show opposing views (comparison/contrast) was considered…

Given the general agreement that learning of texts is facilitated by learners using relevant concepts or schemata to subsume contents, a study was conducted to see if giving learners an advance organizer and requiring anticipation activity would help in the formation of new schemata and, therefore, result in the enhancement of learning. Subjects…

A study was made of the importance to reading comprehension of using the author's top-level organization or textual schema. The subjects, 102 ninth graders with high, average, and low reading comprehension scores, read expository passages, some of which included signals explicitly stating the top-level organizational structure and some of which…

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…

An investigation was conducted to ascertain the effects of the structured overview on both the short-term and long-term comprehension of average and below average readers. The subjects were 143 college students classified as average or below average readers and randomly assigned to either a structured overview (65) or a control group (78). Both…