Abstract
Seventh-grade good and poor readers read a story while performing one of three orienting tasks that induced semantic encoding of individual words, sentences, or short paragraphs. Other students (control) read the story normally. Idea units in the story had previously been rated for structural importance and recall of the idea units at each of four levels of importance was measured. Results indicated that for both types of readers, recall was positively related to level of importance, however, the relationship was stronger for good readers. The order of orienting task conditions was the same for both groups: sentence—paragraph—word. However, the positions of these conditions vis-a-vis the control was qualified by type of reader and level of importance. For good readers, the sentence task was equivalent to the control, the word task was inferior at all levels of importance and the paragraph task was slightly inferior at higher levels of importance. For poor readers, the sentence task facilitated and the word task depressed recall of important ideas while the paragraph task did not differ from the control at any level of importance. One important conclusion from the study is that comprehension and hence recall of poor readers can be enhanced by inducing them to process text in meaningful units.