Imagery and the Recall of Connected Discourse
Sandra Koser Steingart, Marvin David Glock · Reading Research Quarterly · 1979
TWO EXPERIMENTS EXPLORED the effects of imagery and text organization on what is learned from reading a passage. In each experiment, all Ss read three different concrete prose passages. Three different forms of organization were used for the passage sentences. Instruction to the subjects required half of them to visualize the passage information and half to repeat it to themselves. Comprehension was assessed in experiment one by asking multiple choice questions and in experiment two by asking for written recall of correct text relations. Overall, grouping the substantive sentences pertaining to a particular object and its attributes into a single paragraph produced the best comprehension. Randomized text resulted in the poorest comprehension. Imagery was more successful for learning than repetition. There were also interaction effects between text organization and reading strategy. Regardless of text organization, imagery instructed Ss recalled significantly more correct text relations than repetition subjects. Imagery also resulted in a significantly higher level of inference making and in recall protocol organizations which were consistent with figural representations of text information.