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Abstract
This study investigated how advance organizers might assist individuals in recalling idea units from written prose. Ausubel (1968) suggested that advance organizers should help readers to better remember detailed information from text. In addition, an advance organizer, if it provides guidance to the reader, may encourage the reader to remember portions of the text closely associated with the underlying theme from the advance organizer. These hypotheses were tested in experiments with two different populations: seventh and eighth grade social studies students and college students.
Complete data were obtained from 195 junior high school students and 241 college students. Subjects in each experiment were randomly assigned to one of four encoding conditions: control, advance organizer read-only, advance organizer + key word, or advance organizer + paraphrase; to one of two retrieval conditions: no cue or advance organizer at recall; and to one of two testing time intervals: immediate recall or delayed (seven days) recall.
Free recall tests were scored for total number of idea units recalled, number of specific and general idea units recalled, and number of advance organizer and non-advance organizer related idea units recalled. The data were analyzed with univariate and multivariate analyses of covariance using the total reading score from the California Achievement Test for the junior high subjects and the Nelson-Denny Reading Test for the college subjects as covariates.
The junior high students received little benefit from access to the advance organizer. The college students, however, performed better under the combined condition of paraphrasing the advance organizer at encoding and having access to it again at recall. These findings were particularly evident with respect to recalling specific information in an immediate test. Further, the college students who paraphrased the advance organizer at encoding recalled more general information from the text at the delayed testing time.
