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.
2
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.
We observed a significant main effect for importance and a significant fourway interaction involving structure, importance, background and organizer. The more relevant knowledge a reader had, the less dependent he or she was on text structure, and an advance organizer compensated for the absence of relevant prior knowledge.
88
1