The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of instructions designed to activate two organizational cognitive strategies, on two types of delayed free recall of prose. The first type of recall measured was recall of major themes, and the second type was overall recall of themes and supporting details. The two organizational cognitive strategies which the instructions were designed to activate were paraphrasing and searching for themes. The study also attempted to determine if students' reading comprehension ability displayed an interaction with the cognitive strategy activation instructions they received, to produce effects on recall of both types. / The study was conducted in a typical middle school setting with classroom size groups ranging from sixteen to forty-five students. One hundred and four sixth grade students were rank ordered in terms of their reading comprehension ability, and then randomly assigned to three treatment groups, so that the treatment groups were similarly distributed with respect to reading comprehension level. One treatment group received a prose passage to read, along with instructions designed to activate a theme-searching strategy to store the passages for delayed free recall. The second group received the same prose passage along with instructions designed to activate a paraphrasing strategy to store the passage for delayed free recall. The third group -- the control group -- received the same prose passage as the other two groups; their instructions directed them only to reread the passage for delayed recall, rather than to use organizational strategies for storage. / The prose passage used for the study was taken from a standard fourth-grade level reading textbook. In order to avoid effects due to differing lengths of time on task with the prose passage, the instructions were designed so that all three sets were parallel in terms of length and difficulty. Difficulty of the instructions was determined by sentence length, length and phonetic regularity of words, context placement of important ideas, and formatting of the print on the page. / Each group was told to read the passage once and then close their booklets. After all students had done this, they were told to reopen their booklets and follow the treatment instructions. All students were given twenty minutes to read the brief instructions and review the prose passage for later recall. The students were given a free recall test five days later, which was scored by a pair of judges for theme recall and overall recall. The scoring guide employed was based on a linguistic model designed to break down the content of the prose passage into ideas high and low in structural importance, and their supporting details. On a trial sample of thirty recall protocols, the judges had a high level of agreement in classifying the student recall protocols (in their own words) as actual ideas or details in the target prose passage (Pearson correlation coefficient = .97 for theme recall and .99 for overall recall). / The cognitive strategy activation treatments were not found to have a statistically significant effect on either type of delayed recall obtained after five days. Nor were there any significant interaction effects found between the cognitive strategy activation treatments and students' reading comprehension level for either type of delayed recall. Existing research results were reconfirmed in this study with the finding that students' reading comprehension level had a significant effect on delayed recall of both types (p (LESSTHEQ) .001 for theme recall and p (LESSTHEQ) .002 for overall recall). / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 41-02, Section: A, page: 0644. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1980.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74076 |
| Contributors | HOFFMAN, CYNTHIA K., The Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 95 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
Page generated in 0.0026 seconds