Eighth-grade students were given short prose passages that described the distinguishing attributes of fictitious towns. Illustrations were devised to represent the attributes, either separately, thematically, or thematically in conjunction with the mnemonic keyword method. Keyword illustrations proved to be highly effective facilitators of…

Seventh- and eighth-grade students were presented fictitious biographies to remember. Keyword students used a prose-learning adaptation of the mnemonic keyword method. It resulted in higher levels of recall than did control instructions. In a subsequent experiment, the basic findings were replicated on immediate and delayed recognition tests.…

A review of the literature on the function of pictures in prose learning indicates that visual illustrations are helpful to children's learning, but that visual imagery has inconsistent effects on prose learning, although it seems to have potential for assisting those with adequate word recognition but low comprehension. A conceptual framework has…

Four groups of 10- to 16-year-old educable mental retardates listened to a 20-sentence story; subjects (1) viewed pictures; (2) generated mental pictures; (3) heard each sentence twice; or (4) listened to the story once. Recall of story information was highest for those who viewed pictures. (Author/GDC)

Kindergarten and first-grade children listened to a narrative passage under one of five experimental conditions. Prelearning imagery instructions did not facilitate subsequent recall of story information. Similarly intermittently provided pictures did not produce recall gains for unpictured story information, but had a positive effect on recall of…

Several experiments involving approximately 130 6-year-old children were conducted to examine the effects of overt illustration on first graders' learning from oral prose. In all experiments, experimental Ss heard prose selections after or during which they illustrated selection content with plasticized figure cutouts and background scenes while…