High school juniors and seniors participated in three studies of the effects of a thematic organizer on passage comprehension. Comprehension was measured using a cloze procedure in the first study and using a passage-reproduction task in the second and third studies. A thematic organizer (material presented to provide a context for the passage)…

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…