Mathemagenic Behaviours and Efficiency in Learning from Prose Materials: Review, Critique and Recommendations

Faw, Harold W.; Waller, T. Gary

doi:10.3102/00346543046004691

Cited by 137 publications

(99 citation statements)

References 88 publications

(116 reference statements)

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“…Additional support for the selective attention hypothesis comes from research on the effect of inserted questions. Although studies in which overall reading times were measured have produced mixed results (see Faw & Waller, 1976;and Reynolds, et al, 1979, for reviews), when reading times for smaller segments of text have been examined (Reynolds & Anderson, in press;Reynolds, et al, 1979), it has been found that readers selectively attend to information made important by inserted questions and spend less time on material irrelevant to the questions. Rothkopf and Billington (1979) demonstrated a similar effect for reading times and number of eye fixations on sentences relevant to prememorized instructional objectives.…”

Section: Reading In Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Reading in perspective: What real cops and pretend burglars look for in a story.

Goetz¹,

Schallert²,

Reynolds³

et al. 1983

Journal of Educational Psychology

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Abstractattention-focusing hypothesis, readers spent more time on sentence information important to their perspective. Readers' existing knowledge structures (their schemata) influence the comprehension, recall, and perceived importance of elements that make up a text (e.g., Pichert & Anderson, 1977). In this study, two explanations of how schemata might function during encoding were tested. The selective attention hypothesis makes the prediction that activated schemata would lead the reader to identify certain text elements as important and cause an increase in processing for those schema-relevant ideas. The slot-filling hypothesis, by contrast, posits that a schema provides a ready structure into which relevant information can be easily assimilated with no more processing required. Both hypotheses predict that subjects, given different perspectives to take while reading a story, will identify appropriate text elements as most important and will recall more ideas relevant to their assigned perspective. The hypotheses differ in that only the selective attention hypothesis predicts that readers will spend more time reading perspectiverelevant ideas. Two experiments were performed. In both, subjects were assigned to three perspective conditions (burglar, homebuyer, control), and were chosen to represent three naturally occurring perspectives (police, real estate, and education students). In the first experiment, it was found that subjects rated text elements relevant to their assigned perspective as more important than perspective-irrelevant ideas. In the second study, the text was presented via a computer-assisted instruction system that permitted the measurement of reading time for individual sentences. The results confirmed the powerful role of assigned, as opposed to naturally occurring, perspective in determining the likelihood of recall. Consistent with the ,s containing Reading in PerspectiveReading in Perspective

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Section: Reading In Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Reading in perspective: What real cops and pretend burglars look for in a story.

Goetz¹,

Schallert²,

Reynolds³

et al. 1983

Journal of Educational Psychology

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“…Faw and Waller (1976), in their critique of studies of mathemagenic behaviors and learning from prose materials, also pointed out that study time may account for a large amount, but not all, of the differences obtained in these studies. Indeed, Faw and Waller noted that in some studies experimental groups with specified processing tasks were not only more effective (i.e., learned more), but also more efficient (i.e., learned more in less time) than control groups without processing tasks.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Topicalization and Memory for Main Ideas in Prose

Bridge

Belmore

Moskow

et al. 1984

Journal of Reading Behavior

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Two experiments compared the effects of text structure and processing task requirements on memory for the main idea of a passage. College students identified as good or poor readers read a series of short passages in which an initial topic sentence was either present (topicalized) or absent (non-topicalized). In Experiment 1, all subjects were required to generate a title for each passage during reading and then were given a forced-choice recognition test for the main idea of each passage. The results showed that subjects performed better on topicalized passages than non-topicalized passages in both the title generation task and recognition memory. In the second experiment, subjects performed one of three meaningful processing tasks: rating comprehensibility of the passage, choosing the most appropriate main idea, or generating the main idea in their own words. There were no differences due to passage type for either processing task performance or recall of the main ideas, nor were good and poor readers differentially affected by passage type. Generating a main idea sentence following reading resulted in significantly better memory for both good and poor readers than did rating comprehensibility. These results support the position that generative activities facilitate learning of main ideas, even for passages with poor text structure. This finding is important in view of recent studies indicating that the majority of paragraphs written for both children and adults lack an explicit main idea sentence.Reading may be viewed as an interaction between reader and text (Rumelhart, 1977). Thus, comprehension of a prose passage can be affected by 61

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“…These studies embody a wide variety of active learning strategies , including (a) visual or verbal elaboration strategies (e.g., Andre & Sola , 1976;Delaney , 1978;Hunter , 1977;Lyon , 1 977;Rasco , Tennyson , & Boutwell , 1975;Snowman & Cunningham , 1975), (b) generative underlining or sentence generation strategies (e.g., Bobrow & Bower, 1969;Frase & Schwartz, 1975;Rickards & August , 1975) & Gardner , 1976;Carter & VanMatre , 1975;Fisher & Harris , 1973;Shimerlik & Nolan , 1976), (f) probl emsolving strategies (e.g., Olshavsky , 1977), and (g) self-reference strategies (e.g., Meichenbaum , 1975;Rogers , 1977). Good literature reviews in this area are provided by Bernstein (1973), Faw andWailer (1976), andShininerlik (1978).…”

Section: Study~ Skillsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Computer-Managed Instruction: Development and Evaluation of Student Skill Modules to Reduce Training Time

McCombs¹,

Dobrovolny²,

Judd³

1979

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Mathemagenic Behaviours and Efficiency in Learning from Prose Materials: Review, Critique and Recommendations

Cited by 137 publications

References 88 publications

Reading in perspective: What real cops and pretend burglars look for in a story.

Reading in perspective: What real cops and pretend burglars look for in a story.

Topicalization and Memory for Main Ideas in Prose

Computer-Managed Instruction: Development and Evaluation of Student Skill Modules to Reduce Training Time

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