Abstract
Ninety-nine Ss were assigned randomly to learn a passage comprised of six paragraphs in which the statements were organized by concept name, or concept attribute, or in which the statements were scrambled. Each complete passage contained the same 36 statements. These treatments were orthogonally crossed with instructions to employ a name clustering strategy, an attribute clustering strategy, or a subjectively determined organizing strategy. Three learning trials were administered, each of which was followed by free recall. Passages organized by concept name were found to result in greater recall than passages organized by attributes. The name clustering strategy was more dominant than the attribute clustering strategy, lncongruence between passage organization and advocated clustering strategy resulted in greater recall than did congruency. Implications of these results for cognitive processing of information are discussed
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The research reported in this paper was supported in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA Order No. 1269) through the Office of Naval Research under Contract ONR Nonr N00014-67-A-0385-0006. The authors are indebted to Dr. Paul Games for his consultation regarding the statistical analyses employed in this study.
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Di Vesta, F.J., Schultz, C.B. & Dangel, T.R. Passage organization and imposed learning strategies in comprehension and recall of connected discourse. Memory & Cognition 1, 471–476 (1973). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03208911
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03208911