FACILITATING RETENTION THROUGH INSTRUCTION ABOUT TEXT STRUCTURE

In an attempt to investigate the effectiveness of instruction in the use of text structure for comprehending and recalling textual information, ninety college students received one of three treatments. They received either a brief descrip-tion of the organization of a text immediately prior to reading the text, after reading but before recalling the text, or they received no text-organization in-struction. Research report and journalism structures were employed. For both text structures, subjects who received instruction prior to reading performed better on a delayed free recall test than subjects who received instruction prior to recall or than subjects who received no instruction. Subjects who received instruction prior to reading also had better recognition scores than subjects who received instruction prior to recall. Instruction prior to recall had no facilitative effect relative to the no-instruction control treatment. The research report structure led to better performance than the journalism structure. Results suggest that, when encountering well-organized text, skilled readers can profit from instruction about the structure of written materials. Readers use the structure of texts to guide the encoding and retrieval of textual information (Meyer, 1975). The strategy of using text structures to guide text processing is more likely to be used by good readers than by poor readers (Meyer, Brandt, and Bluth, 1980). While the research of Meyer has focused upon expository texts, other researchers have examined narratives and reached similar conclusions; skilled readers use their tacit understanding of text structure in comprehending and recalling stories (Mandler & Johnson