Topicalization and Memory for Main Ideas in Prose

Abstract

Two experiments compared the effects of text structure and processing task requirements on memory for the main idea of a passage. College students identified as good or poor readers read a series of short passages in which an initial topic sentence was either present (topicalized) or absent (non-topicalized). In Experiment 1, all subjects were required to generate a title for each passage during reading and then were given a forced-choice recognition test for the main idea of each passage. The results showed that subjects performed better on topicalized passages than non-topicalized passages in both the title generation task and recognition memory. In the second experiment, subjects performed one of three meaningful processing tasks: rating comprehensibility of the passage, choosing the most appropriate main idea, or generating the main idea in their own words. There were no differences due to passage type for either processing task performance or recall of the main ideas, nor were good and poor readers differentially affected by passage type. Generating a main idea sentence following reading resulted in significantly better memory for both good and poor readers than did rating comprehensibility. These results support the position that generative activities facilitate learning of main ideas, even for passages with poor text structure. This finding is important in view of recent studies indicating that the majority of paragraphs written for both children and adults lack an explicit main idea sentence.