Learning Objectives and the Organization of Prose. Research Bulletin No. 9.

To establish the joint effects of the orienting factors of structure, learning objectives, and time on the recall of the content of a prose passage, an experiment involving 108 college students was conducted. The study combined two levels of structure (ideationally high and ideationally low) with three conditions of objectives (ideationally high, other objectives, and no objectives) and with two study time conditions (10 and 15 minutes). The learning materials consisted of two scientific prose passages, each 500 words long. Various measures of learning were derived from a free-recall test immediately following the treatments. The results offer support for the selective attention hypothesis which is usually advanced in relation to the orienting role of objectives. They further revealed that time had little effect on this orienting role. With respect to structure, the findings support the theory that the prominance of ideas does lead to better recall of these ideas. Structure, however, was found to lose its effect when objectives were present. Thus there were no joint effects of objectives and structure. (Copies, in French, of the passages with their instructions and objectives, the free-recall test, the strategy questionnaire, and the protocol correction form used in the experiment are appended.) (Author/FL)