Investigating the comprehension, recall, and transfer of factual information in social studies texts by fifth-grade students with variation in the presence or absence of graphic organizers and explicitness or implicitness of instruction

Although the graphic organizer (GO) has been labeled a spatial learning strategy (Barron & Schwartz, 1984), in actuality it has never been experimentally investigated as a strategy per se. In addition, although a few studies have attempted to examine the presence or absence of the partially-teacher constructed graphic organizer (e.g., Boothby & Alvermann, 1984), none have examined the absence or presence of the student-constructed GO. The following investigation was conducted to examine: (1) the degree to which normally-achieving fifth-grade subjects required teacher intervention for constructing their own graphic organizers, and (2) the extent to which the presence or absence of the visual-spatial, graphic representation of text (i.e., the graphic organizer) facilitated normally-achieving fifth-grade subjects\u27 comprehension and recall of expository text. Results of the study can be summarized in the following three points: (a) contrary to the stated research hypotheses, subjects in the Explicit Graphic Organizer condition, in general, performed at a lower level on measures of comprehension and recall than subjects in the other four conditions; (b) subjects in the Implicit No Graphic Organizer condition, the condition void of a graphic organizer or of explicit teacher directed instruction, performed at a higher level on most of the dependent measures; and finally, (c) the graphic organizer appeared most facilitative when subjects were required to read and recall expository passages of novel content