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This article reports the results of two studies which investigated the im- pact of inserted questions on the studying activities of students reading their own course related materials. In both studies macro eye-movements of the students were monitored as they studied texts with or without inserted questions. In Study 1, involving 36 undergraduate university students, the Question Group showed more lookbacks to relevant information than the No Question Group with one of two sets of questions, and more lookbacks to incidental information with both sets of ques- tions. However, neither reading time nor performance on a test differed between the two groups. Study 2 was designed to extend the findings to elementary school chil- dren and to examine the effects of ability. A sample of 54 fifth-grade better and poorer readers were given course related materials either with or without inserted questions. Children given inserted questions did not look back to relevant material more often than children without questions. Poorer readers given one of two sets of Preliminary versions of the studies discussed in this article were presented at the American Educational Research Association convention, Los Angeles, 1981, and at the 20th Interna- tional Congress of Applied Psychology, Edinburgh, Scotland, July 1982. Preparation of this article was carried out while the first author was on faculty leave at the Textual Communica- tion Research Group of the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University in Milton Keynes, England. This leave was partially funded by grants from the National Science Foundation (SPI 8165093) and the Ohio University Research Committee. Special appreciation is given to the students and faculty of the Morrison Elementary School in Athens, Ohio, for their help on Study 2.

The study was designed to (a) isolate some of the conditions under which advance organizers facilitate the retention of prose, and (b) identify processes children employ when preparing to recall prose. First and fourth grade children either received or did not receive an advance organizer prior to the presentation of a passage. The passage was difficult to comprehend without knowledge of the advance organizer and contained an equal number of sentences which were relevant and irrelevant to the main theme of the story. Results showed that older children who did not receive the advance organizer actively generated their own advance organizer at an earlier sentence during passage presentation than younger children. Additionally, older children who did not receive the advance organizer recalled a greater amount of relevant than irrelevant thematic information. Hence, two factors must be taken into account in order to assess accurately the relationship between advance organizers and children's recall of prose: the possibility that children generate their own thematic structure or advance organizer for a passage and the effect of advance organizers on the recall of relevant versus irrelevant thematic information. Investigators from several theoretical frameworks have found it useful to conceptualize memory as the result of mnemonic activities or processes in which the human organism engages. From the Soviet literature, Smirnov and Zinchenko (1969) have argued that memory is primarily the outcome of goal-oriented behavior. Hence, in order to exhibit memory, the subject must incorporate the material to-be-remembered in some sort of activity which leads to a particular goal. Similarly, Piaget and Inhelder (1973) have conceptualized memory as the result of the organism's active assimilation of information into existing cognitive structures. American cognitive and information processing theorists have also emphasized the The authors wish to express their sincere appreciation to Pat Clark and Sandy Rainbow for their assistance in data collection. The authors would also like to thank the principal, teachers, and children of Nelsonville Elementary School for their willingness to participate in the study. Requests for reprints should be sent to Daniel J. Christie, Department of Psychology, Ohio State University, Marion, Ohio 43302.

The study sought to determine (a) if age-related increases in memory for prose are, in part, due to deliberate mnemonic strategies, and (b) if older children use the high order relations in prose more efficiently than younger children. Tape-recorded passages were presented to 40 first and 40 fourth grade children. To induce deliberate mnemonic strategies, half of the children from each grade were informed that there would be a memory task; the rest were not told. Additionally, half of the children from each grade were presented contextual information which made the high order relations in prose apparent; the remaining children were not presented contextual information. After passage presentation, each child was asked to reconstruct the story. The analysis of variance indicated that older but not younger children exhibited higher reconstruction scores if they were told versus not told about the memory task. These results suggest that older children engaged in deliberate strategies. Additionally, reconstruction scores were higher if contextual information was presented than withheld. Apparently if contextual information is available, older as well as younger children efficiently retain the analysis of the high order relations extracted from prose. The American literature on memory development is replete with studies indicating that memory development is, in part, due to the development of deliberate mnemonic strategies (Meacham, 1972). While this conception of This investigation is based on a doctoral dissertation submitted to Ohio University by the first author and supervised by the second author. The authors wish to express sincere appreciation to Dr. George Klare, Dr. Danny Moates, Dr. Hal Arkes, and Dr. William Cooper, committee members, for their helpful comments and suggestions. A version of this paper was presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, New Orleans, March 1977. Requests for reprints should be sent to Daniel J. Christie, Department of Psychology, Morrill Hall, The Ohio State University, Marion, Ohio 43302.

The research on the cognitive processes in writing has led to models of the writing process such as that of Flower and Hayes. The work underlying these models has been carried out on relatively unconstrained writing genres. The purpose of this study was to investigate the types of processes used by journalistic writers when producing texts of varying constraints. A three tier methodology was used to offset certain methodological difficulties. Journalism students wrote either a news story or an editorial under either a pausal procedure, a pausal interview, or a protocol. It was found that news story writers paused more often and carried out more activities per writing session than did editorial writers suggesting greater monitoring activity by news story writers. In addition, news story writers were extensively concerned with accuracy and appeared to use a preorganized structure to guide writing and a priorities list to determine order of mention. Editorial writers paused less often and somewhat longer indicating a more open ended task. They appeared to adopt one of two strategies—treat the editorial as a news story with an opinion paragraph or search for a personal viewpoint. The results indicated that the Flower and Hayes model is applicable in a limited manner to journalistic writing.

In order to study the interaction of passage structure and advance organizers a prose passage containing information about 6 obscure American Presidents was presented to 144 college students either in 1 long paragraph or 6 separate paragraphs. Half of the subjects in each condition were given an advance organizer describing the passage organization and half were not. Contrary to expectation, subjects given a passage with neither paragraph cues nor an advance organizer recalled better than subjects given paragraph cues but no advance organizer. Subjects given advance organizers were intermediate regardless of paragraph structure. Results were interpreted from an activity or levels of processing position.

This article discusses how research on the origins of writing from such fields as anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and history provides new perspectives on current writing research and on the teaching of writing. Four major issues are considered: (1) the functions of writing, (2) the influence of writing and writing systems on the writer, (3) the role of the writing topic on writing, and (4) writing and the decontextualization of knowledge. The implications of these issues for research on and the teaching of writing are considered.

The primary objective of this study was to investigate the role of content knowledge on topic choice in writing. Children's knowledge on topics they wanted to write about (want topics), on topics they did not want to write about (don't-want topics), and on topics the teacher chose (teacher topics) was measured using Langer's topic-specific knowledge measure. Results showed that children had significantly more knowledge, as assessed by the fluency and combined knowledge measures, on the want topics compared to the don't-want topics. In addition, children had significantly more knowledge on the want topics than on the teacher topics. There was no significant difference in knowledge between the children's don't-want topics and the teacher topics. These findings not only demonstrate the significant role of content knowledge on one writing process, topic choice, but also add support to students' self-selection of writing topics.

The concept of schema has come to play an important role in recent models of human cognitive functioning. In this paper, the major characteristics of this concept are outlined. This is followed by a discussion of how the concept has influenced psychologists and educators in their views of the processes involved in reading, comprehending and remembering prose passages. In a final section, some of the implications of the concept of schema for text design and construction are considered.

Script-recall differences between reflective and impulsive subjects were investigated. Using the Bower, Black, and Turner (1979) methodology, it was found that reflective subjects recalled more stated actions than did impulsive subjects regardless of number of instantiations of scripts presented, indicating that cognitive style influences schematic information processing.

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses a way to test design alternatives that are available. Since the mid-1970s, there has been remarkable growth in developing new process measures to aid document design. These process measures provide those interested in text design with the means to conduct direct assessments of the processes subjects use as they attempt to handle the documents with which they are faced. Such direct tests are not aimed at replacing decisions made on the basis of tacit knowledge gained by those who design documents. Rather, these procedures can come to play a useful role in providing evidence on difficult aspects of a particular text design, in helping to externalize the knowledge that good designers of text have gained, and in deriving general principles of document design.