DOCUMENT RESUME ED 239 240. CS 007 '490

A study was conducted to determine the effects of age, verbal ability, education, reading habits, and recall strategies on prose recall among adults. Subjects were 422 adults in three age groups--young (18-28 years), middle (40-54), and older (62-80). They were asked to read and recall in writing two 388-word prose passages and to answer questions about their background reading habits and recall strategies. The results indicated that while increasing age was associated with a decrease in recall, both verbal ability and education were better predictors of recall than was age. In addition, a recall strategy factor representing "paragraph by paragraph" __retrieval produced the highest simple correlations with total recall and contributed significantly to the explanation of other recall measures. Reading habit factors associated with recall reflected subjects ' self- assessment, as good and trequent readers as well a