Although the school assessment context in England relies heavily on externally imposed forms of testing, it also takes many different forms, including the use of examinations with pre-release materials. These examinations allow teachers and students early access to materials that will be used during assessments at a later date. This project uses a…

Advance organizers, activities used before the learning task, can help mainstreamed learning disabled adolescents organize information more efficiently. Ten steps for developing advance organizers proceed from informing students to introducing vocabulary and stating the general outcome desired. This approach is easy to implement and may result in…

This investigation examined whether advance organizers would help learning disabled (LD) adolescents to more efficiently process information on selected academic tasks. There were three phases: First, 51 LD and 63 normally achieving (NA) subjects participated in the development of a test to measure important and unimportant information. Second,…

The study examined the effects of an advance organizer on the learning and retention of facts and concepts obtained from a sound film by educable mentally retarded (N=30) and regular children (N=30) in a mainstreamed secondary public school class. Also examined was the interaction between the advance organizer and ability levels of the Ss. Results…

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)

Offers suggestions on teaching students to find the answers in a passage by asking questions before reading the material. (RB)

The authors review research on effective practices in secondary schools with relevance for secondary teachers of learning disabled students. Three elements appear to be related to student learning: time for student learning, teacher-student interaction, and lesson structure. Research on each of these elements is reviewed and suggestions made for…

The study found that an interactive vocabulary instructional strategy, semantic-feature analysis, significantly improved the social studies content area text comprehension of 25 learning disabled adolescents. Prior to reading the text, students receiving the experimental instruction completed a relationship chart relating important ideas to key…

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…

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)…

The study examined the use of advance organizers by seven regular secondary teachers with seven learning disabled students. Advance organizers did positively affect students' retention of information, but only after students were taught to attend to and use the advance organizers. (Author/DB)

This study investigated the assumption that students use instructional objectives as advance organizers. This assumption, developed by D. Ausubel (1968), is appealing to instructors, but has been difficult to test experimentally. Participants in this study were 8 teachers from 4 different ethnic groups applying the design in 2 lessons for 4…

This study tested the common assumption that lists of instructional objectives (LIOs) presented at the start of a lesson are used as advance organizers (AOs). Because traditional research designs have yielded conflicting results, an alternative design was used that sought to falsify the necessary association between the objectives and their use…

Grade 10 students were taught a hierarchy of intellectual skills in three different contexts: skills taught in isolation; additional verbal instructions provided; and skills taught in relation to a relevant anchoring idea. Results showed that use of the anchoring idea context enhances meaningful learning of complex skills. (Author/GK)

Results of 3 experiments indicated that graphic organizers, whether teacher directed, student directed with text references, or student directed with clues, produced significantly higher performance than self-study for students (grades 7 and 10) either with learning disabilities (N=12), in remedial classes (N=9), or in regular education (N=389).…