Text Cueing and Comprehension

Abstract

This is one in a series of studies concerned with the effectiveness of instructional assistance on comprehension of scrambled text. Subjects were General Psychology students at the University of Colorado. Subjects reconstructed one of two 26-sentence passages with the aid of signalling sentences which assisted in determining the original sequence. These sentences were placed in proper order prior to the reconstruction task. A third group of subjects read the scrambled discourse without reconstruction. Our major findings were: (1) recall of idea units was assisted by the use of signalling sentences, (2) recognition of original sentences and paraphrases was also assisted by signalling, and (3) degree of concordance (tau) between reconstructed order and the original sentence sequence was a function of passage content. The contribution of signalling alone as compared to signalling and feedback suggests that the amount of instructional assistance provided is not necessarily proportional to achievement. There appears to be a complex set of relations among achievement, content, and instructional assistance; these need to be examined further.