Temporal Organization in Prose

Abstract

Sixty high school students studied two, five-paragraph text passages in which the content was organized around either a semantic, temporal, or random theme. Half of the learners in each group were instructed to try to organize the material in some fashion which would aid them in remembering it on a later test. All students received free recall, semantically cued and temporally cued tests following reading. In free recall, both the semantic and temporal organization formats yielded superior performance compared to the random condition. For the cued tests, the most words were remembered when the mode of organization matched the type of test cue. There were no effects for the instructions to organize. These data indicate that what people remember from text is strongly influenced by both the structure of the content, and the type of test performance required.