Textual Organization, Advance Organizers and the Retention of Prose Material

Abstract

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,

Some Conditions Surrounding the Effectiveness of Advance Organizers for Children's Retention of Orally Presented Prose

“…Moreover, the superior recall of relevant versus irrelevant idea units by children who were not presented the advance organizer was primarily due to the performance of older children. Although the present study does not offer evidence for a causal relationship between older children's active generation of their own advance organizer and recall performance, previous studies (Smirnov & Zinchenko, 1969;Schumacher, Liebert, & Fass, 1975) have raised the interesting possibility that under certain conditions, subject generated plans lead to better recall than does an experimenter generated plan. In the present study, the children's active generation of an advance organizer is essentially a subject generated plan while the presentation of an advance organizer is comparable to an experimenter generated plan.…”

Twenty years of research on advance organizers: Assimilation theory is still the best predictor of results

“…YES. * Especially on transfer questions AO = 1.7, C = 4.9 (average errors in learning) AO = 40%, C = 33% (for transfer questions) AO = 40%, C = 45% (for easier questions) Schumacher et al (1975), 140 college students 1. MAYBE.…”

“…In another MTI study, Schumacher et al (1975) asked 140 college students to read a 600-word passage on six obscure U.S. Presidents with a 50-word advance organizer (AO) given before reading or not at all (C). The passagewas organized as six separate unrelated paragraphs or as one integrated whole with transition phrases added.…”

The effect of instructor‐prepared handout materials on learning from lecture instruction

“…Some research has examined the effect of printed lecture aids provided students by the lectures. Schumacher, Liebert, and Fass (1975) found that written material in the form of one whole paragraph with no advance organizer produced significantly more recall than the same material divided into several paragraphs with no advance organizer, while the same material with an advance organizer produced intermediate results. Klemm (1976) provided a skeleton outline to half the members of one class and compared the achievement of these students with those who did not receive the outline.…”