Lorch, R. F. J., & Lorch, E. P. (1996). Effects of headings on text recall and summarization. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 21(3), 261-278.

Lorch, R.; Lorch, E.

1996

Lorch, R. F. J., & Lorch, E. P. (1996). Effects of headings on text recall and summarization. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 21(3), 261-278.

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Two hypotheses about how organizational signals influence text recall were tested: (a) that signals cause readers to change their text-processing strategies and (b) that signals facilitate readers' attempts to encode topic structure information but do not cause a shift in strategies. College students read and recalled a text that contained either no signals or contained headings, overviews, or summaries emphasizing the text's topic structure. At recall, students either received no cues or were reminded of the text's topics. Providing cues facilitated recall much more in the 3 conditions involving signaling than in the no-signals condition. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that organizational signals induce readers to change their text-processing strategies.

Given the findings for the topic access and conditional recall measures, the interaction of headings and familiarity found for overall recall reflects the joint effects of headings and familiarity on topic access. When a topic is highly accessible even in the absence of headings, headings provide no further recall benefits; however, when a topic is otherwise relatively inaccessible, headings improve access to text topics and thus lead to better overall recall.

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