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College students were asked to read a prose passage and to take an exam on the contents of the passage. Subjects received an easy or hard version of the passage, were either allowed or not allowed to underline key phrases while reading, and were either motivated or not motivated by payment of money. Three key results were found: (a) Non-highly motivated subjects performed better on the easy version than on the hard version of the text; (b) underlining aided only highly motivated subjects; and (c) underlining aided the subjects who worked on the hard version of the text. Results were interpreted from motivational and activity viewpoints.

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Abstract. In order to study the interaction of passage structure and advance organizers a prose passage containing information about 6 obscure American Presidents was presented to 144 college students either in 1 long paragraph or 6 separate paragraphs. Half of the subjects in each condition were given an advance organizer describing the passage organization and half were not. Contrary to expectation, subjects given a passage with neither paragraph cues nor an advance organizer recalled better than subjects given paragraph cues but no advance organizer. Subjects given advance organizers were intermediate regardless of paragraph structure. Results were interpreted from an activity or levels of processing position.An active area of research recently has been the investigation of the role of passage organization on the amount and type of information recalled from prose passages. Both Frase (1969) and Freidman and Greitzer (1972), for example, have studied the effect on prose retention of manipulating name versus attribute organization of passages. Meyer and McConkie (1973) have noted that measures of passage organization are highly related to the recall of material from a prose passage. DiVesta and Gray (1973) scrambled the order of paragraphs of material and significantly altered the subjects' ability to recall.With few exceptions no systematic rationale or procedure has been generated for the exploration of the interaction of such organizational characteristics with other variables thought to influence prose retention. It is quite possible that the influence of passage organization on recall will be modulated by other variables.One such variable which logically might be expected to interact with passage organization is information given to the subject about the structure of the passage; in particular, advance organizers. According to Ausubel (1960) advance organizers provide subjects with information about a passage which helps the subject relate the information in the passage to what the subject already knows. The advance organizers are usually thought to provide subjects with higher level structural information which helps the subject interpret, understand and remember the a Reprints may be requested from Dr. Schumacher,