This study investigated subjects' ability to combine and organize information from different sentences, as well as their ability to retain that information. Ninety-six college undergraduates were given three trials to learn the characteristics of ships from a text. Attributes of each ship were clustered together (name organization), or sentences…

Shares 12 steps to using found poetry as an introduction to a unit on poetic composition. (MG)

Examination was made of subject-generated as compared to experimenter-provided underlining of sentences that were least or most important to the overall structure of the passage presented. Additionally, some readers were instructed to underline any one sentence per paragraph, while others were asked simply to read the passage. (Author/BJG)

College students studied text about an imaginary solar system. Two cuing systems were manipulated to induce a single or double set of cues consistent with one or two sets of text propositions, or no target propositions were specified. Cuing systems guided construction and implementation of prose-processing decision criteria. (Author/RD)

A study of 66 university students who studied a chapter, rated the way they studied, and completed two tests on the chapter indicates that the self-report method appears to be a reasonable way to monitor what subjects are doing and undergoing when they are studying. (Author/CM)

Previous research conducted from a schema theory perspective has neglected those instances where the reader is confronted with unfamiliar text. This issue is addressed, and initial results on training students to acquire and use form schema in processing relatively unfamiliar descriptive prose are presented. Thirty-two college students were…

Undergraduates read a prose passage and were tested on its contents. Difficulty, permission to underline key phrases, and financial motivation were varied. Non-highly motivated subjects performed better on the easy version; underlining aided highly motivated subjects and those reading the difficult version. (Author/RD)

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)

An experiment was conducted to examine how objectives influence organization of information recalled from text. Objectives were hypothesized to affect sequence of attention, rehearsal during a review period, and to serve as retrieval cues. Results indicated that organization by objectives occurs during rehearsal but not encoding or retrieval…

The guide presents information on a creative writing course for verbally gifted senior high school students. Part I of the course consists of general exploration activities on literary forms: the journal, the poem, the short story, and a student selection from among such types as one-act plays, essays or by-lined articles, editorials, and TV (or…

The utility of the keyword method is assessed in three experiments where eighth-grade students were asked to learn the purported accomplishments of various individuals, as described in several short fictitious passages. The method appears to hold promise for improving students' learning of a variety of school content. (Author/AL)

The orienting role of objectives was examined in relation to text organization--defined in terms of ideational prominence of elements. Ideational prominence, which was manipulated, did influence learning, but lost its effect when relevant objectives were provided. Both orienting factors were also found to be little influenced by a time constraint.…

To help students achieve a better understanding of narrative prose, yet still keep the benefits of semantic mapping, the traditional form of the semantic map is modified by incorporating the elements of story structure as part of the map. This format is called episodic mapping. Episodic mapping is based on the idea that most well-developed stories…

A study examined the connection between the everyday activities of adults of different ages and their performance on a prose recall task. Subjects were 54 adults, 18 in each of three age groups (18-32, 40-54, and over 62). Written recall of two 388-word expository prose passages was used for the prose recall measure. For the activities measures,…

Field-independent and dependent students read or took notes on a logically organized or scrambed article. Field-independent students scored better than field-dependent students on items of high structural importance to the meaning of the passage. Cognitive style effects on material of low structural importance were not significant. (Author/RD)