A review of recent ERIC materials concerned with textbooks, prose learning, and learning strategies, to determine factors that contribute to learning from textbooks. (DD)

This paper develops the thesis that the knowledge a person possesses has a potent influence on what he or she will learn and remember from exposure to discourse. After outlining some assumptions about the characteristics of the structures (schemata) in which existing knowledge is packaged, a theory of the processes involved in assimilating the…

Two experiments concerned with memory and comprehension of prose passages were conducted with children from second through seventh grade. In both experiments the major variable was the provision of appropriate frameworks for comprehending ambiguous sections of the passages. In the initial experiment, recognition of theme-congruent and…

A recognition paradigm was employed to assess developmental changes in memory for within-sentence (premise) and between-sentence (inference) information from 16 brief prose stories. Eleventh graders retained significant amounts of both premise and inference information, while fifth graders showed substantial retention only for premise information.…