Context orientation and depth of processing were tested as possible explanations for thematic organization. The process of searching for the theme of prose passages was detrimental to recall. Theme statements facilitated recall when provided prior to each passage. The theme search process was beneficial only when the correct theme was identified.…

The present series of experiments was designed to examine the factors affecting the ability of people to draw inferences from a passage of text. It was found that, using a true-false recognition test, proportion correct was higher and reaction time shorter on inferred information than on information that was actually presented. This was the case…

The question of how people learn and remember information from complex written materials is explored by means of Grime's semantic grammar of propositions and the author's analysis of the content structure of prose. This paper, presented at the 1973 Interdisciplinary Meeting on Structural Learning, first discusses such elements of the semantic…

Study investigated the effects of retelling practice sessions on the prose comprehension of fourth grade proficient and less proficient readers. For four sessions, they read silently, rendered free recall, then retold if desired. Researcher assessments indicated such practice in retelling caused significant improvements in quantity and quality of…

The effect of cognitive style on the performance of four groups of college students (n=326) who used different strategies of study to comprehend prose was investigated. The cognitive styles of the subjects (field dependence/independence) interacted with the strategies of study and seem to affect performance on comprehension of prose at posttest.…

The effect of variations in the organization of information and in contextual features upon comprehension of prose was tested using four tasks. Organization was varied to contrast hierarchical information structures and list information structures, and to test the effect of linking the structural components of the passage into a conceptual…

The effect of supplementary questions on learning from textual materials was investigated in a sample of 94 college juniors. Each subject was given a 1,500-word passage describing the concept of measurement. One treatment group was asked to identify characteristics of the concept; another was asked to identify examples from the text; a third…

A study investigated the relationship between high and low reading ability and the study techniques of reading, the usual method of note taking, and student-generated paragraph summaries on the six levels of cognitive learning from textual material as measured by Bloom's "Taxonomy." Subjects, 84 college students enrolled in an…

A sample of 208 students from grades ten through twelve were randomly assigned to one of four groups in a study of the effects of multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and constructed modes of response to embedded questions on the learner's ability to answer application-type questions. The three experimental groups received five instructional…

This study extended concepts derived from Rothkopf's mathemagenic hypothesis to problem solving. While previous mathemagenic research has established that adjunct questions interspersed with written prose facilitates learning, it has been criticized as educationally nonsignificant because the research has focused on verbatim learning. To test…

College students read passages and answered either verbatim or parphrased adjunct questions either inserted in the text or massed at the end of the passage. Passage review was varied. On the post-test containing unfamiliar paraphrased questions, students given inserted paraphrased adjunct questions outperformed the others. Paraphrased questions…

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)

Retroactive interference (RI) in prose learning was investigated in an experiment where passages were constructed on the basis of a predetermined logical structure. This structure made it possible to operationally define similarity and assess the effects of RI for inferential information as well as that stated directly in the original passage.…

In experiments with seven- to ten-year-old children, mismatched pictures increased learning of prose that was heard and prose that was read. Presence of pictures mismatched to prose they accompanied had little negative impact on cued recall. Twenty-seven references are provided. (Author)

The effects of pictorial illustrations on memory for text were studied in 144 college students. Two experiments indicated that illustrations serve a supplementary function; adjunct pictures alone, without special processing instructions, do not help learners encode information that is not normally encoded in the first place. (SLD)