ABSTRACT
This chapter presents author's comments on general literature in this area and relates it to Meyer's work. Included here are studies going back at least 50 years in which subjects were asked to engage in various activities, such as summarizing, outlining, or underlining text, which it was apparently thought would aid the student to identify and process critical elements in the textual materials. As Meyer correctly states, there are several different approaches to the study of organizational effects in prose learning. Although these are probably not mutually exclusive, they are sufficiently distinct to be given separate consideration in the context of our discussion today. Lee (1965) found differences favoring an elaborated text that included advance organizers, headings, and summaries over unelaborated and scrambled versions. However, the methodology employed by Lee makes it unclear whether these effects were due to the organizational variables involved, or to simple repetition of test-relevant information.
