Effects of advance organizers on immediate and delayed recall of oral learning in grades four and seven

The goal of this study was to explore the use of advance organizers in an oral learning situation at two elementary school grade levels. It had four main purposes: 1) to determine whether or not advance organizers would facilitate retention in oral learning; 2) to determine if one particular type of organizer would facilitate more than another; 3) to discover whether there were grade differences in retention from an oral lesson; and 4) to determine if there would be differences in the occasion of recall (immediate or delayed). Students in grade four and seven were randomly assigned to one of four treatment groups: no organizer, outline organizer, prequestion organizer and visual organizer. Each of the treatment groups employing an advance organizer received the same abstract comparative advance organizer followed by an organizer unique to their treatment. The no organizer treatment received an unrelated listening task in place of the organizers. After an oral learning task of connected discourse, presented on audio tape, all subjects received one of two versions of a sentence completion test based on the listening task. This was the measure of immediate recall. One week later they were administered the second parallel version of the same test as the delayed recall measure. The results indicated no facilitative effects for advance organizers. There were also no statistically significant interactions between the treatment group and grade level or occasion of recall. Grade level and occasion both showed main effects. After reexamining the stimuli and recall measures utilized in the study, it was decided that the absence of the expected facilitating effect for advance organizers and of any interactions with them was probably due to poorly constructed stimuli and inappropriate recall measures combined with some administration difficulties. The grade level main effect was attributed primarily to developmental memory capacities while the main effect of occasion might be accounted for by depth of processing differences.Education, Faculty ofEducational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department ofGraduat