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 recal1 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.

Headings and familiarity interacted in recall (experiment 1) but not in the summarization task (experiment 2). The two factors did not interact significantly in the summarization task because the role of retrieval processes - the locus of their interaction - is much reduced in summarization relative to free recall. Thus, although the interaction of headings and familiarity is similar to the interaction of headings and length in free recall, the results of experiment 2 indicate that the interactions have different origins.

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