Sanchez, R. P., Lorch, E. P., & Lorch Jr., R. F. (2001). Effects of headings on text processing strategies. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 26(3), 418-428.

Sanchez, R.; Lorch, E.; Lorch Jr., R.

2001

Sanchez, R. P., Lorch, E. P., & Lorch Jr., R. F. (2001). Effects of headings on text processing strategies. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 26(3), 418-428.

geen

This experiment addressed the question of how headings influence readers' memories for text content. College students read and recalled a 12-topic expository text. Half of the participants were trained to construct a mental outline of the text's topic structure as they read and then use their mental outlines to guide their recall attempts. The remaining participants did not receive such training. Half of the participants read a text containing headings before every subsection; the other half read the same text without headings. The results were that participants who received training and/or read the text with headings remembered text topics and their organization better than participants who received no training and read the text without headings. The results support the hypothesis that signals induce a change in readers' strategies for encoding and recalling text.

The results of the experiment are entirely consistent with the predictions of the selection hypothesis and the findings of Lorch and Lorch (1995). The three conditions involving training and/or headings were statistically indistinguishable on all measures. In comparison, participants who read the unsignaled text without training accessed fewer topics during recall with the consequence of lower overall recall. In addition, the organization of topics at recall was less consistent with the text's organization for these participants.

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