Lorch, R. F. J., & Lorch, E. P. (1995). Effects of organizational signals on text-processing strategies. Journal of Educational Psychology, 87(4), 537-544.

Lorch, R.; Lorch, E.

1995

Lorch, R. F. J., & Lorch, E. P. (1995). Effects of organizational signals on text-processing strategies. Journal of Educational Psychology, 87(4), 537-544.

geen

Two experiments examined how headings influence text recall and summarization. In a free recall task (Experiment 1), the presence of headings facilitated recall of unfamiliar topics but not familiar topics. In a summarization task (Experiment 2), headings and familiarity had independent effects, whereas headings interacted with the amount of discussion of a topic, such that headings had a greater influence on the likelihood that a topic would be included in a summary only when the topic was briefly discussed. Findings are interpreted as indicating that headings and the amount of discussion of a topic jointly influence readers' representation of a text's topic structure and so interact in summarization. Headings and familiarity jointly influence the accessibility of topic information and thus interact in recall, but not summarization.

In sum, all results showed the same pattern of interaction between the signaling and cuing manipulations. On all measures, students who read a text containing some type of organizational signal benefited substantially from being presented the topic labels as recall cues, whereas students who read a text without signals did not benefit at all from the recall cues.

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