The Structure of Prose: Effects on Learning and Memory and Implications for Educational Practice

Abstract

Most of the knowledge a person acquires comes from reading or listening to prose. Thus, an important goal in education has long been to help people develop the ability to acquire information from their reading and listening. Research in education dealing with learning from prose has tended not to examine the influence of aspects of prose itself on which aspects of it are remembered. In contrast to educators' frequent use of prose in studies, in the past psychologists generally have tended to avoid research with natural prose. The content structure of a passage shows how some ideas in the passage are subordinate to other ideas. Some ideas from a passage are located at the top levels of the content structure, others are found at middle levels, and still other ideas are found at the bottom levels of the structure. Clear and consistent findings dealing with the height of information in the content structure have emerged from several studies.