Some Conditions Surrounding the Effectiveness of Advance Organizers for Children's Retention of Orally Presented Prose

Abstract

The study was designed to (a) isolate some of the conditions under which advance organizers facilitate the retention of prose, and (b) identify processes children employ when preparing to recall prose. First and fourth grade children either received or did not receive an advance organizer prior to the presentation of a passage. The passage was difficult to comprehend without knowledge of the advance organizer and contained an equal number of sentences which were relevant and irrelevant to the main theme of the story. Results showed that older children who did not receive the advance organizer actively generated their own advance organizer at an earlier sentence during passage presentation than younger children. Additionally, older children who did not receive the advance organizer recalled a greater amount of relevant than irrelevant thematic information. Hence, two factors must be taken into account in order to assess accurately the relationship between advance organizers and children's recall of prose: the possibility that children generate their own thematic structure or advance organizer for a passage and the effect of advance organizers on the recall of relevant versus irrelevant thematic information.