Williams, T. R., & Butterfield, E. C. (1992). Effects of advance organizers and reader's purpose on the level of ideas acquired from expository text-part II. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 22(3), 281-299.
Williams, T.; Butterfield, E.
1992
Williams, T. R., & Butterfield, E. C. (1992). Effects of advance organizers and reader's purpose on the level of ideas acquired from expository text-part II. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 22(3), 281-299.
1
An empirical examination of the issues of advance organizers raised in part 1. The influence of background knowledge, text structure, & reader's purpose on the efficacy of advance organizers was investigated in two experiments. Both studies considered whether advance organizers increase recall of subordinate text detail & superordinate text concepts by adult readers who lack "prior knowledge subsumers." After reading introductory & target materials, Ss were evaluated for their recognition of idea units belonging to four levels in the text's structural hierarchy: structurally high & important or unimportant, & structurally low & important or unimportant. Ss (N = 48 college students) were randomly assigned first to irrelevant or relevant background conditions, & then to text plus advance organizer, text plus nonorganizer introduction, advance organizer only, & nonorganizer introduction only conditions. Analysis revealed significant main effects for having read relevant background materials & for importance of idea units. Findings also showed a significant structure by importance interaction in which structurally high & important information was remembered better than structurally high & unimportant information. A significant organizer by text or no text interaction, & an absence of an effect of the advance organizer suggest that the organizer affected text processing rather than serving a priming function. Experiment 1 was replicated in experiment 2 (N = 88), replacing the text/no text condition with a purpose/no purpose condition. Analysis demonstrated that Ss provided with relevant background materials scored higher on the subsequent test than did those who received no background information. Results revealed a two-way interaction between structure & importance, & a four-way interaction involving structure, background, organizer, & importance. Readers with more relevant background knowledge were less dependent on text structure. It also seems that an organizer can compensate for the lack of relevant background knowledge.
There were significant main effects for having read a relevant text and for importance of idea units, and an interaction between structural level and importance. A significant organizer by text or no text interaction and absence of a significant main effect for the organizer indicated that the organizer influenced text processing rather than priming relevant prior knowledge, which is a previously undocumented requirement of advance organizer research.
48
1