Eighty college students read textbook passages that either included marginal inserts to signal key concepts or did not include these inserts. Signaling key concepts enhanced performance on content quizzes overall and on subsets of items assessing signaled material. Performance was not affected on subsets of items for nonsignaled content. Students…

Hypothesizes that typographic cues structured according to a defined set of common attributes within textbooks enable readers to discriminate between various levels of information and to make generalizations about the information contained in each level. Proposes a method of identifying and ranking categories of information. (KEH)