Behavioral objectives should be regarded as one of several tools available to educators. Research should be directed toward determining their advantages and limitations, as well as the conditions under which they can be used more effectively. Conditions vary depending upon student awareness of and interest in stated objectives; clarity,…

One hundred-fifty subjects studied a passage with questions interspersed at different locations. Total level of acquisition was highest in treatments involving postquestions and no questions. The results were attributed to the influence of adjunct questions on learner expectations that affect the selective processing of information. (Author/JAC)

The accuracy of the feeling-of-knowing was assessed with regard to recall and recognition under three conditions: advanced or nonadvanced organizers; learned or nonlearned information; and sex differences. Twenty subjects learned pair-associates and were tested for recall and recognition, accompanied by ratings of feeling-of-knowing strength.…

Providing contextual cues leads to more effective learning than depth of semantic processing activity. However, the positive effects of contextual cues are reduced when the subject must search for the theme during the learning activity, as opposed to having it presented before the passage. (CP)

Eighth-grade students read passages that described three dichomtomized attributes of eight North American minerals. Mnemonic instruction, given to one-third of the students, generally produced greater memory for the minerals' attributes. Implications of the findings are discussed with specific regard to remembering scientific taxonomies and their…

A study investigated the effect of relevant background knowledge on the reading comprehension of students of Spanish. Students with limited knowledge of baseball took a comprehension test on a Spanish-language report of a baseball game. Results indicate that background knowledge is possibly more important than language level for comprehension.…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a comparative advance organizer in an oral format on learners' immediate and delayed retention of subject matter related to food and nutrition when controlling for learners' prior knowledge level. Another area of interest was to investigate whether paraphrasing the comparative advance…

A cause-and-effect relationship exists between the event called teaching and the event called learning. Teachers should create antecedent conditions for learning by motivating students and by using strategies such as explaining, comparing, and reinforcing. (PP)

The literature on "organizers" by Ausubel, Earl, and Tyler provides clues to help teachers and students relate what has been learned in one subject to what is being learned in another. Problems of integration in a curriculum for student nurses are examined, and a solution to these problems is described. (RM)

Concludes that previewing a reading selection improved the comprehension, recall, and reading attitudes of junior high school students who were poor readers. (FL)

Two groups of undergraduates were forced to process a maplike organizer before or after reading a difficult prose passage concerning the formation of a meander. Subjects with little prior knowledge, provided with the organizer, recalled at a level similar to subjects with a good deal of background knowledge. (Author/CM)

The author examines Novak's position that science and mathematics educators should discard Piaget's theory of intellectual development in favor of Ausubel's theory of meaningful learning as a guide for teaching practice and research. (PB)

A prereading strategy designed to predict events and provide practice in answering questions requiring inferences between text and prior knowledge were used with elementary school students. The performance of experimental groups surpassed that of the control groups on some measures while results were mixed on other measures. (MKM)

Three groups of university students read a passage with a beginning summary, an end summary, or no summary at all. Results showed that the end summary led to significantly better recall scores. Further research is suggested, using different types of summaries and texts, and different methods of recall. (Author/SJL)

Focuses on how reading comprehension can be facilitated with a multimedia application for second language learning. Results indicate that a dynamic visual advance organizer does aid in overall comprehension and that annotations of individual vocabulary items consisting of both visual and verbal information help more than verbal information only.…