effects of graphic organizer instruction on fifth-grade students
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This article was downloaded by: [Queensland University of Technology]On: 20 October 2014, At: 05:33Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
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Effects of Graphic Organizer Instruction on Fifth-GradeStudentsCynthia C. Griffin a , Linda Duncan Malone b & Edward J. Kameenui ca University of Floridab Ball State Universityc University of OregonPublished online: 15 Jul 2010.
To cite this article: Cynthia C. Griffin , Linda Duncan Malone & Edward J. Kameenui (1995) Effects of Graphic OrganizerInstruction on Fifth-Grade Students, The Journal of Educational Research, 89:2, 98-107, DOI: 10.1080/00220671.1995.9941200
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Effects of Graphic Organizer Instruction on Fifth-Grade Students CYNTHIA C. GRIFFIN LINDA DUNCAN MALONE EDWARD J. KAMEENUI University of Florida Ball State University University of Oregon
ABSTRACT This study was undertaken to examine two fundamental questions related to the use of graphic organizer instruction with fifth-grade, normal-achieving students: (a) Does graphic organizer instruction facilitate comprehension, recall, and transfer of information contained in an expository textbook? and (b) To what degree is explicit instruction neces- sary for independent generation and use of graphic organizers by students? In four experimental conditions, participants read social studies information with or without the graphic organizer. The conditions were further separated by the pres- ence or absence of explicit instruction. Participants in the con- trol condition received traditional basal instruction, as pre- scribed by the teacher’s manual of the district-adopted textbook. Participants in all groups performed comparably on acquisition and retention measures. However, when required to read and recall novel social studies content, participants receiving the graphic organizer and explicit instruction per- formed better on the measure of transfer than students who received traditional basal instruction did.
patial learning strategies appear to provide readers S with a procedure for successfully extracting, remem- bering, and retrieving information from one of the most difficult reading situations encountered in schools: an expository, academic textbook (Holley & Dansereau, 1984). One such spatial learning strategy that has received much attention by both researchers and practitioners is the use of graphic organizers. Although much research on the effectiveness of graphic organizers in facilitating text comprehension has been conducted (Alvermann, 198 I , 1982; Alvermann, Boothby, & Wolfe, 1984; Barron, 1969; Barron & Schwartz, 1984; Griffin, Simmons, & Kameenui, I99 I ; Herber, 1978; Moore & Readence, 1980, 1984; Simmons, Griffin, & Kameenui, 1988) and practi- tioners have embraced its use (Englemann, Davis, & Davis, I98 I ) , important questions surrounding the effec- tiveness of graphic organizers persist.
Our purpose in the present study was to investigate two significant features of graphic organizers that have eluded researchers: (a) the extent to which the visual-spatial, hierarchical display of expository textbook information facilitates the comprehension, recall, and transfer of text-based information and (b) the degree to which instruction must be explicit and direct to facilitate stu-
dents‘ independent construction and use of graphic orga- n i zers.
The following literature review includes an overview of the history and theory undergirding graphic organizer instruction. In addition, studies examining the graphic organizer as a prereading adjunct and as a postreading technique. as well as the results of two meta-analyses, are discussed in light of the purposes of the present study.
Historicul Perspective
The graphic organizer, originally called a structured overview. was developed as an attempt to translate Ausubel’s ( 1968) cognitive theory of meaningful reception Ieurning into practice. Ausubel argued that an individual’s existing knowledge or cognitive structure is a major vari- able in learning new material in a content area. Thus, he hypothesized that new meanings are acquired only when they are related to previously learned information. Further, new learning will be enhanced if the existing information is clearly and concisely organized. Accordingly, Ausubel argued that learning and retention could be facilitated by strengthening components of a learner’s existing cognitive structure .
Ausubel ( 1968) promoted the use of an advunce orguniz- eras a way for teachers to strengthen students’ existing cog- nitive structure with classroom learning tasks. According to Ausubel, the advance organizer was an introductory prose passage that included content most important to the struc- ture of the passage. Ausubel stated that advance organizers “provide ideational scaffolding for the stable incorporation of the more differentiated material in the learning passage” and “increase the discriminability between the new materi- al and similar or conflicting ideas in cognitive structure” (p. 148).
Other researchers (Barron, 1969; Earle, 1970; Estes, Mills, & Barron, 1969) proposed the idea that a visual-spa- tial representation of the information presented within an advance organizer would support existing cognitive struc- tures, and initial research supported this hypothesis. This visual-spatial representation became known as a strucrured overview. Various studies (Barron, 1969; Barron & Cooper, 1973; Estes, 1972) were undertaken to investigate whether one procedure would be more effective than others as a
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method for improving students’ general reading ability (as measured by a standardized test) and passage-specific reading (as measured by a cloze test). No differences were found between groups of students receiving advance orga- nizers, structured overviews, or no introduction to the pas- sage on either measure of reading ability. Subsequently, in an attempt to explain the negative findings obtained from the three studies, Barron and Schwartz (1984) noted that the structured overviews had been conceptualized as “something a teacher did for students” (p. 279). As a result, study participants may have viewed the information in the structured overview or in the advance organizer as isolated pieces of information and therefore did not inte- grate the information with their existing knowledge struc- tures. Thus, the question became, how can students be encouraged to integrate new information with their exist- ing knowledge? Barron and Stone (1974) attempted to answer the aforementioned question by developing a tech- nique referred to as a graphic postorganizer. The authors postulated that student participation in the process of developing the postorganizer would facilitate integration of new information with their existing knowledge. They argued that students should be taught to construct their own organizers of the text after reading an expository selection, rather than being presented with an organizer as a readiness activity.
Specifically, Barron and Stone (1974) examined 141 10th- and 1 lth-grade students’ learning of vocabulary relationships in a passage on mental health. Students were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: graphic advance organizer (GAO), graphic postorganizer (GPO), or control (C). The dependent variable was a vocabulary relationship test (VRT) that was based on the content structure of the passage. Each item on the 25-item test consisted of four terms, three of which were related to the passage. The students’ task was to indicate which of the four terms was unrelated. Two orthogonal planned com- parisons were undertaken. The first comparison contrasted achievement on the VRT between the GAO and GPO con- ditions and yielded a statistically significant difference in favor of the GPO condition. The second comparison con- trasted the performance between GAO and the control group and yielded no statistically significant difference. Although the findings appeared to support the facilitative effects of the GPO, the study had a fundamental method- ological confound. Two variables, position of the graphic organizer (pre or post) and teacher versus student con- struction, were manipulated simultaneously in the study. Therefore, it was difficult to determine which variable contributed to the difference between conditions.
Although grounded in theory, early research designed to assess the efficacy of the graphic organizer was inconsis- tent. Since Barron and Stone’s (1974) study, the graphic organizer has been examined further. We now turn to a review of those more recent graphic organizer studies that are relevant to the design of the present investigation.
The results of two meta-analyses conducted by Moore and Readence (1980, 1984) have three important implica- tions for graphic organizer instruction and the cumnt inves- tigation. First, graphic organizer instruction is more effec- tive when used with expository texts than when used with lecture activities. Second, graphic organizer instruction is most facilitative when used as a postreading activity than when used as a prereading activity. Finally, graphic orga- nizer instruction tends to produce greater gains when vocabulary, rather than comprehension, is used as a criteri- on measure.
Findings from research conducted on GPO instruction had the greatest influence on the design of the present study. Here we examined graphic organizer instruction as a postreading rather than prereading activity. In addition, we chose to conduct graphic organizer instruction within the context of the social studies classroom and with the use of a social studies (expository) textbook. Both of these design features are supported by recommendations made by Moore and Readence (1980, 1984). Another important feature of the present investigation was student participation in the graphic organizer construction process. Participants were involved in the development of the graphic organizer in two of the four experimental conditions. This design feature is consistent with a recommendation made by Barron and Stone (1974) that study participants be allowed to con- sciously incorporate new information with their existing knowledge through active participation in the graphic orga- nizer construction process. The graphic organizer construc- tion process that was used in this study closely paralleled the steps identified by Horton and Lovitt (1989). After con- structing more than 100 graphic organizers as part of their research on the graphic organizer, Horton and Lovitt (1989) found that when GPOs were constructed using certain steps, the ability of secondary students with disabilities to be suc- cessful in regular education, content-area classrooms was enhanced. The steps these authors recommended include the following: (a) Select and divide chapters to be modified into passages of about 1,500 words, (b) construct an outline of the main ideas in the reading passage, (c) choose a graph- ic organizer format that fits the structure of the information, and (d) prepare teacher and student versions of the graphic organizer.
In the literature on graphic organizer instruction, we did not find studies addressing the degree of teacher explana- tion and direction needed to facilitate the graphic organizer construction process. In addition, we were unable to locate any research that had made the simple, yet fundamental, comparison between graphic organizer instruction and a control condition (see Griffin 8t Tulbert, 1995, for a review of the literature on graphic organizer instruction). Because this important information did not appear in the research lit- erature, we investigated the following two questions: To what degree is explicit instruction necessary for indepen- dent generation and use of graphic organizers by students? and Does graphic organizer instruction facilitate compre-
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hension, recall, and transfer of information contained in an expository textbook?
Method
Participants
Five intact classrooms of fifth-grade students from three homogeneously grouped classes ( n = 61) from one elemen- tary school (i.e., School A) and two homogeneously grouped classes (n = 38) from another elementary school (i.e., School B) in a small, midwestem city participated in the study. Participant selection was restricted to students who (a) correctly answered no more than 40% of the ques- tions on an experimenter designed pretest, (b) obtained composite reading scores on the Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills (CTBMcGraw-Hill, 1984) that fell between the fourth and the ninth stanines, and (c) were not receiving special education services. A total of 13 students were elim- inated from the study based on their composite (i.e., total) reading scores on the Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills (CTBMcGraw-Hill, 1984) and enrollment in special edu- cation programs. Once participant selection was complete, intact classrooms of students were randomly assigned to experimental and control conditions.
Pretest
All participants were administered a 16-item, short- answer pretest to (a) determine the equivalence of the treat- ment groups and (b) identify any students who possessed prior knowledge of the content. The pretest surveyed one topic (i.e., a chapter on Canada) from the district-adopted social studies text. According to reports from their teachers, students had not read the chapter before participating in the study. No students were eliminated from the study based on their pretest scores (25 possible points). A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) on the pretest scores revealed no sta- tistically significant differences between the five experimen- tal and control conditions, F(4, 94) = .995, p = .41 > .05.
Materials
Experimental passages. The experimental passages were all subsections of Chapter 22, “Canada,” from The United States and Its Neighbors (Silver Burdett Co., 1984), which was the district-adopted social studies text. Figure I contains an example of an experimental training passage. The passage used for the transfer measure was titled “South America” and was selected from The United States and Its Neighbom (Sil- ver Burdett Co., 1984).
Graphic organizers. We constructed nine graphic organiz- ers, one for each subsection of the chapter, plus two final review graphic organizers. The most important ideas (i.e., “main ideas”) and details (i.e., “important helping ideas”) were extracted from the experimental passages. Graphic
organizers were subsequently designed to reflect the hierar- chy of information within the passage and relationships of this information within the hierarchy. (Although Horton and Lovitt, 1989, found the text structure of expository textbook material to be either hierarchical or compare<ontrast, all textbook information used in this study had a hierarchical structure.)
The purpose of the graphic organizer was to highlight important information within the text and not to provide extensive coverage of all the textual information. Each graph- ic organizer differed in content as well as in the visual-spa- tial configuration. To minimize the amount of information within each cell of the graphic organizer, we restricted word- ing to single words, phrases, or simple sentences. In addition, no more than 10 cells were included within any of the graph- ic organizers (Englemann & Carnine, 1982). We designed the cells to show how the information in an entire passage was related. The main ideas of the passages were placed in large geometric shapes (e.g., a large triangle), and supporting ideas were placed in the same, but smaller, shapes (e.g., a small tri- angle) to depict the relationship between the main idea and supporting details of a paragraph of text. If more than one paragraph was covered in a single graphic organizer, then the type of shape used changed with each paragraph. The amount of information included in the graphic organizer was altered after the first four graphic organizers were presented. That is, participants began constructing the graphic organizers on their own by the time the fifth graphic organizer was present- ed. Figure I contains an example of a graphic organizer and the accompanying textbook passage.
Scripts. Teaching scripts were developed and used by the investigators to communicate the textual information to study participants (i.e., in conjunction with the graphic organizer or through the use of a list of main ideas and important helping ideas) and to add relevant information that was not provided in the graphic organizer or in the list of ideas. All wording that appeared in the graphic organizer or the list of ideas was also included in the script. In addition, the teacher wording in each script requested students to focus their attention on the graphic organizer or the list of ideas and included statements that drew attention to the relational links of ideas presented in the graphic organizer and in the list of ideas.
During the beginning stages of instruction, teacher scripts were highly explicit. The investigators followed the scripts, word for word, to ensure that both investigators were familiar with the instructional procedures. By the 3rd day of instruction. the teacher scripts were reduced to include only the critical features of the instructional proce- dures that afforded the investigators a more natural style of presentation.
Experimental Procedures
Participants in all experimental conditions were trained over a 10-day period. On the 10th day of the study, a cumu- lative review session was provided. All sessions were 45
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min in length and were conducted in the students’ class- rooms.
h o investigators conducted the instructional sessions. To control for possible trainer effects, we counterbalanced ses- sions across investigators. On 1 day, one investigator taught all of the groups at School A, while the second investigator taught all of the groups at School B. Investigators then alter- nated between schools for the remaining instructional ses- sions. Finally, participants in each of the five groups were presented the same content (i.e., topics on Canada) over the course of the study.
Grouping Procedures
Five intact classrooms of 99 participants were randomly assigned to one of five treatment conditions: (a) explicit
graphic organizer instruction (Ex GO, n = 20), (b) explicit instruction no graphic organizer (Ex No-GO, n = 21), (c) implicit graphic organizer instruction (Im GO, n = 21), (d) implicit instruction no graphic organizer (Im No-GO, n = 20), and (e) traditional basal instruction (traditional, n = 17). A detailed description of each experimental and control condition follows.
Explicit graphic organizer instruction condition (Ex GO). Participants in the Ex GO condition received detailed instructions for identifying important information within the text and constructing graphic organizers. The investiga- tors called attention to the specific structure of the text (i.e., the superordinate and subordinate ideas) and the features of the graphic organizers (e.g., the hierarchical arrangement of ideas).
Initially, the experimenter led students through each
Figure I.-Example Graphic Organizer and Accompanying Text
CANADA: HISTORY AND GOVERNMENT
Arctic Canda
Europeans 13)
History and Government
Commonwealth province ofticial language descent Separatist
Indians and Inuir. In Chapter 3 you learned that the first people who came to live in North America came from Asia. They probably came by way of Alaska. Those people were the ances- tors of the Indians and Inuit of Canada. The Inuit settled in the Arctic area of Canada. They lived by hunting and fishing. The Indians who came to Canada went farther south than the Inuit. They lived in central and southern Canada. Of the 24 million people in Canada today,
fewer than 20,000 are Inuit. Some Inuit still live in northern Canada. Some of them still hunt and fish for a living. Others works in industry, espe- cially mining and transportation. There are about 300,000 Indians in Canada today. Many of them live on reserves, or reservations.
Thefirsr Europeans. The first Europeans who came to Canada were explorers. They explored the eastern coast of what is now Canada and the United States. They caught fish on the Grand Banks. Banks are a part of the seafloor. They rise above the floor around them. Banks do not rise high enough to be a danger to ships, how- ever. The Grand Banks are just off the island of Newfoundland (nu’fand land). The explorers came ashore to dry their fish and repair their boats. But few of these people made their homes here.
One French explorer, Jacques Cartier, sailed his ship up the St. Lawrence River as far as the present city of Montreal (mon tre 01’). On his return to France, he described the rich soil in the valley of the St. Lawrence River. This land was very different from the rugged coast of eastern Canada. Here people could settle and till the soil.
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paragraph of text, identifying the superordinate ideas (i.e., “main ideas”) and subordinate ideas (i.e., “important help- ing ideas”). Participants were taught specific rules for iden- tifying the main idea (e.g., “The main idea tells about the whole passage”) and important helping ideas (e.g., “The important helping idea(s) are the most important ideas with- in each paragraph that tell more about the main idea”). Fol- lowing the identification of the main ideas and important helping ideas for a passage of text, students copied the graphic organizers shown by the investigator on the over- head projector. Study participants were assisted in identify- ing not only the features of the graphic organizer (i.e., the geometric shapes, hierarchical arrangement, and connecting lines) but also how the content was to be placed within the graphic organizer (i.e., the superordination and subordina- tion of ideas).
After the 1st week of instruction (i.e., 5 days), less time was spent reviewing the procedures for identifying main ideas and important helping ideas and constructing the graphic organizer, and more time was spent helping stu- dents to generate the ideas and graphic organizers on their own. In other words, a gradual transfer of control of leam- ing from investigators to students was developed. Initially, students received explicit instruction, followed by guided and independent practice activities. In addition, study par- ticipants were involved in student-regulated practice activi- ties (Gamer, Alexander, & Hare, 1991; Pearson & Gal- lagher, 1983) requiring them to refer back to the rules for identifying ideas once they had generated the ideas on their own. For example, a student might generate the important helping idea, “Inuit settled in the Arctic of Canada.” The student had been coached in earlier lessons by the investi- gators to ask herself if the idea “tells more about the main idea.” The student would then validate her idea by asking herself whether “Inuit settled in the Arctic of Canada” told more about the main idea “Indians and Inuit.”
Each instructional session provided students with an opportunity to read a portion of text, identify the appropri- ate main ideas and important helping ideas for that text, and develop a graphic organizer for the identified ideas. After the first instructional session, the investigators reviewed the content discussed on the previous day by presenting a blank version of an investigator-generated graphic organizer (i.e., void of printed wording). Once students had recalled all that they could remember, the remaining ideas were filled in and the graphic organizer was displayed on the overhead and reviewed in its entirety. This review process occurred after all subsequent sessions.
Explicit instruction no graphic organizer condition (Ex No-GO). Participants in the Ex No-GO condition received the same instruction as the Ex GO condition, with the exception that the construction of the graphic organizer was eliminated. After students identified the ideas for that day, they used the remaining time to study the ideas. This study time was used in place of the time allocated to the con- struction of the graphic organizer in the Ex GO condition.
Implicit graphic organizer instruction condition (Im GO). Participants received instruction designed to demon- strate, through a range of investigator-prepared examples, graphic organizer construction. The investigator did not call attention to the specific structure of the text or the exact features of the graphic organizer, but provided stu- dents with the information that was generated and acted upon by students in the explicit conditions. Investigators progressed through the text, paragraph by paragraph, in a manner similar to the Ex GO condition. However, all main ideas and important helping ideas were identified by the investigator only, without input from the students. At times, students voluntarily identified main ideas and important helping ideas from the text. Although this information was acknowledged, no discussion was initiated by the investi- gator as to how students arrived at the given ideas. Also, students were not provided with information that specified, by applying rules, how these ideas should be identified independently.
After the investigator identified the main ideas and important helping ideas for students, graphic organizer construction began. The investigator presented an investi- gator-constructed graphic organizer to students on the overhead projector and requested that participants copy the organizer. The investigator did not draw explicit attention to the features of the graphic organizer, such as the hierar- chical structure of the graphic organizer; the geometric shapes used to represent the superordinate, subordinate, or coordinate nature of the ideas; or the connecting lines used to show that the terms were related. The investigator mere- ly constructed a graphic organizer of the current text and displayed the graphic organizer for participants to copy.
After the first instructional session, the investigator reviewed the information presented on the previous day through the use of the investigator-generated blank graph- ic organizer (i.e., void of printed words) and provided par- ticipants with cues to recall the information, the completed graphic organizer from the previous day was displayed and the information in the cells was reviewed. This review process was continued each day thereafter.
Implicit instruction no graphic organizer condition (Im No-GO). Participants in the Im No-GO condition received the same instruction as that of the Im GO condition, except for the elimination of the visual-spatial display. Students were provided with time to study the identified ideas in place of the time allocated to the reproduction of the graph- ic organizer in the Im GO condition.
Traditional basal instruction (traditional). Participants in the traditional condition received instruction as outlined in the teacher’s manual of the district-adopted social stud- ies text (i.e., The United States and Its Neighbors, Level 5 , Silver Burden Co., 1984). Instructional procedures used included (a) requiring students to write sentences using the key vocabulary words identified in each chapter subsec- tion, (b) dividing students into small groups and assigning the groups “what if’ questions before reading the text, (c)
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requiring students to answer literal comprehension ques- tions after having read the text (i.e., “Check up” questions), (d) teaching students how to read a map with contour lines, and (e) teaching students how to read a chart and analyze the data.
After the first instructional session was completed, the investigator reviewed the information from the previous day by asking once again the check-up questions posed the day before.
Dependent Measures
Three types of measures (i.e., immediate and delayed posttests, immediate and delayed recall measures, and a transfer test) were administered to assess students’ compre- hension, retention, and transfer of the social studies content. A description of each measure follows.
Immediate and delayed recall measures. After the com- pletion of all instructional sessions, two written free recalls were administered to assess students’ immediate and delayed recall of the entire chapter on Canada. The imme- diate recall measure was administered the day after instruc- tional sessions ended. The delayed recall measure was administered 12 days later. Directions given to students were identical for both immediate and delayed recall mea- sures:
Over the last 2 weeks, we have discussed a chapter in your social studies book on Canada. The text content has focused on Canada’s history and government, as well as the land and climate of Canada.
On the sheet of paper I have given you, please write all of the ideas you can remember about Canada’s history and government, as well as Canada’s land and climate. You have 10 minutes to write.
Immediate and delayedposttests. Upon completion of the immediate recall measure, an immediate posttest, made up of 20 short-answer items, was administered to participants to assess their comprehension of the entire chapter content. A variety of response forms were used in developing the posttest, including analogy, sentence completion, multiple choice, true/false, label identification, and explanations of statements. The maximum possible score on this measure was 25 points. The posttest assessed the range of informa- tion that was taught during the 10 instructional sessions and provided a measure of the students’ immediate retention and comprehension of the content taught during the experiment.
The delayed posttest was administered 12 days after com- pletion of the instructional interventions to determine main- tenance effects of the treatments on students’ comprehension of the text material. This measure consisted of the same items used in the immediate posttest. However, to guard against a practice effect, we changed the item order.
Transfer measure. The day following the completion of the immediate recall and the immediate posttest, a written free recall was used to assess the effect of treatment gener- alization on students’ recall of novel social studies text mate-
rial. The content of the transfer passage was on South Amer- ica. The passage was selected from a social studies text not used by the district, and the content had not been a part of the social studies scope and sequence for the first through fifth grades. The Appendix contains the transfer passage.
Scoring of Dependent Measures
Immediate and delayed posttests. The immediate and delayed posttests were measures of comprehension and retention of the text material on Canada. The scoring pme- dures for those tests were fairly straightforward. Answer keys were developed and used to score each test. Tivo grad- uate students in education independently scored all posttests. On both measures, correct responses received either 1 or 2 points depending on the number of responses required per question. Incorrect and partially correct responses did not receive credit.
Each test was rescored to determine the reliability of the scoring procedures. Interscorer reliabilities for the respec- tive tests were (a) immediate posttest, 96.8%. and (b) delayed posttest, 96.8%. All disagreements were resolved in conference.
Recall measures. The immediate and delayed recall measures and the transfer test were all measures of written recall. To assess the amount of information recalled by students on their written protocols, we used Johnson’s (1970, 1974) pausal unit analysis procedure to identify the individual idea units within each experimental passage.
One hundred forty-one undergraduate students enrolled in education classes parsed the experimental passages into individual units. An average of 20 students parsed each individual passage. A unit identified by 50% or more of the raters was retained for further analysis.
Following Johnson’s (1970, 1974) procedure, the same pool of undergraduate students rated the structural impor- tance of the previously identified individual units to the overall theme of the passage. Using a process developed by Brown and Smiley (1977), we first asked raters to elim- inate one quarter of the units that they judged least impor- tant to the overall theme of the passage. This procedure was repeated twice until only one quarter of the units remained. Remaining units in the last set were judged to be the most important to the overall theme of the passage. The 22 structurally most important units (SMIUs) were identified for the chapter on Canada. For the transfer pas- sage on South America, 7 idea units were deemed to be most important to the theme. These idea units were then compared with the units generated by students. Each stu- dent was given 1 point for each SMIU that was recalled verbatim or in gist form (i.e.. a paraphrase of the original idea).
Two graduate students independently scored all recall protocols. They scored 25% of the written recalls to deter- mine interscorer reliability. The interscorer reliabilities for the respective recall measures on all idea units identified
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were (a) immediate recall, 92.72%; (b) delayed recall, 89.16%; and (c) transfer measure, 90.86%. An average interscorer reliability for the recall measures was 90.91 % agreement. Disagreements were resolved in conference.
Fidelity of Treatment
To ensure comparability of the teaching presentations given by both investigators, we videotaped each investiga- tor five times (i.e., one time for each treatment condition) during the 10 days of the experiment. A set of essential instructional features was developed for each treatment. Two graduate students independently viewed the tapings and tallied responses according to the set of essential instructional features. The data indicated that both investi- gators followed the designated procedures. No significant instructional deviations were noted.
Results
Multivariate Analysis
We used a one-way, between-groups multivariate analy- sis of variance (MANOVA) to evaluate the effects of the treatment conditions on study participants’ immediate and delayed comprehension, recall, and transfer of social stud- ies content. The five dependent variables were immediate and delayed posttests, immediate and delayed recall, and the transfer measure. Treatment served as the only between- groups factor.
Based on Pillai’s Trace, the effect of treatment on the combined comprehension, recall, and transfer variables was statistically significant, F(20,372) = 3.366, p < .0001. Uni- variate tests were subsequently conducted on each of the five dependent measures.
Univariate Analyses
Immediate and delayed posttests. Results of ANOVAs revealed no significant main effect for treatment on the immediate, F(4,94) = 1.554, p > .05, or delayed, F(4,94) = .675, p > .05, posttests (see Table 1 for the means and standard deviations for these dependent variables).
The immediate and delayed recall measures were ana- lyzed by the number of SMIUs students generated in their written products. A more detailed description of how these units were identified is included in the discussion of the scoring procedures for the recall measures (see Table 2 for the means and standard deviations for these dependent variables).
Immediate recall (SMIUs). Results of the ANOVA revealed no significant main effect for treatment, F(4, 94) = 2.326, p > .05.
Delayed recall (SMlUs). The results of the ANOVA revealed a statistically significant main effect for treat- ment on this measure, F(4.94) = 2.950, p < .05. The sub-
Table 1.-Means and Standard Deviations for the Immediate and Delayed Posttests
Group Immediate posttest Delayed posttest
Ex GO M SD
M SD
Im GO M SD
M SD
M SD
Ex No-GO
Im No-GO
Traditional
12.450 5.520
10.810 4.238
I 1.350 4.246
12.286 5.05 I
9.1 18 3.689
9.400 4.957
8.476 5.173
8.000 3. I79
10.143 5.85 I
8.647 3.061
Table 2.-Means and Standard Deviations for the Immediate and Delayed Recall Measures
Immediate recall: Delayed recall: Structurally most Structurally most
Group important units important units
Ex GO M SD
M SD
Im GO M SD
M SD
M SD
EX NO-GO
Im No-GO
Traditional
6.350 4.557
3.571 2.908
3.650 2.8 I5
4.333 3.022
4.94 I 3.172
3.800 2.9 I3
2.952 3.008
2.650 2.540
4.190 2.228
5.412 2.980
sequent Tukey-Kramer post hoc test for multiple compar- isons indicated that students who received traditional basal instruction (p = 5.41 2) performed significantly bet- ter on the measure of delayed recall than did students who received the Im GO instruction (p = 2.650). All other com- parisons were nonsignificant.
As with the immediate and delayed measures of recall, the total number of SMIUs generated by students were analyzed for the transfer measure (see Table 3 for the means and standard deviations for this measure).
Transfer measure (SMlUs). Results of the ANOVA revealed a statistically significant main effect for treat- ment for this measure, F(4, 94) = 6.642, p c .05. The sub- sequent Tukey-Kramer post hoc test for multiple compar- isons indicated that students who received the Ex GO (p = 1.800), Ex No-GO (p = I .952), and Im GO instruction (p
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lhble 3.-Mm and Standard Deviations for the l h m f e r Mensum: South America Passage
Group Structurally most important units
Ex GO M SD
M SD
Im GO M SD
M SD
M SD
Ex No-GO
Im No-GO
Traditional
1.800 1.436
1.952 1.203
1.500 1.357
.762 1.179
.294 ,470
= 1.500) performed significantly better on the transfer measure than students who received the traditional basal instruction (p = .294). All other comparisons were non- significant.
Discussion
We have organized our discussions of the treatment effects across experimental conditions by the type of depen- dent measure (i.e., acquisition, retention, and transfer) used.
Acquisition Measures
The acquisition measures used in the study included the immediate posttest and the immediate recall measure. Results of these measures suggest that the performance of treatment and control groups was comparable for the imme- diate acquisition of the instructional content. However, an examination of the descriptive data reveal that students receiving Ex GO instruction had the highest mean scores on both the immediate posttest and the immediate recall mea- sure. This outcome is important to examine, particularly in light of the added demands made on students in the Ex GO condition. That is, students in the Ex GO condition were required to learn not only the content but also the proce- dures associated with graphic organizer construction. This finding can be explained through a comparison of the nature of instruction in the GO and No-GO conditions.
The primary differences between the GO and No-GO conditions may best be understood in terms of the declara- tive and procedural knowledge requirements placed upon students in those conditions (Paris & Jacobs, 1984). That is, students in the No-GO conditions were required to learn the content on Canada through either explicit or implicit instructional procedures. However, no demands were
placed upon these learners to acquire procedural knowl- edge related to graphic organizer construction. Students in the GO conditions, on the other hand, were given the dual task of learning not only the content on Canada (i.e., declarative knowledge, “knowing what”) but also the pro- cedures necessary for constructing graphic organizers inde- pendently (i.e., procedural knowledge, “knowing how”), either explicitly or implicitly. One might conclude then that the immediate acquisition of the textual material about Canada was more manageable for students in the Ex GO condition because of the increased support provided during explicit instruction.
Retention Measures
The delayed posttest and the delayed recall measures served as the retention measures for the study. Student performance on the delayed posttest was comparable to that of the immediate posttest. That is, students in all study conditions remembered about the same amount of infor- mation on Canada after the 10-day delay. However, partic- ipants in the traditional instruction condition recalled sig- nificantly more information than students in the Im GO condition on the delayed recall measure. Although this finding appears important, it is suspect. Participants in the traditional instruction condition actually improved their performance on the recall measure from the immediate to delayed administrations (see Table 2). Considering this finding in light of a study conducted by McLeish (1978) is potentially illuminating. In a study on the presentation of lecture material, the author found that only 17% of mater- ial presented in a 55-min lecture was remembered 1 week later. This lack of retention is remarkable and makes it dif- ficult to conclude that participants in the present study actually recalled a greater number of idea units over time. It is more likely that some other factor (e.g., discussion of the content among participants between administrations of the recall measure) triggered the growth in idea units gen- erated by the traditional instruction condition.
Transfer Measure
Up to this point, the pattern of results suggests that, in general, students performed comparably on measures of acquisition and retention. However, when students were asked to read and recall novel content about South Amer- ica on the transfer measure, students participating in the Ex GO, Ex No-GO, and Im GO conditions recalled more idea units than students in the traditional instruction con- dition did.
The results suggest that the explicitness of instruction and/or the graphic organizer played important roles in stu- dents’ ability to generalize the instruction to novel textual material. A common feature of both explicit conditions included identifying main ideas and important helping ideas. Participants in the Ex GO condition identified the
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106 The Journal of Educational Research
ideas and then used them to construct graphic organizers. Participants in the Ex No-GO condition identified the ideas only. This identification process was not totally unique to the present study. In an earlier graphic organizer study of the student-constructed type, Bean, Singer, Sorter, and Frazee (1986) provided participants in one of the two graphic organizer conditions with a five-step strategy for summarizing and generating questions related to expository material. Participants were required to identify and develop topic sentences for each section of text within a chapter. This process is similar to the identification of main ideas and important helping ideas in the present study. Results of the Bean et al. (1986) study indicated that students provid- ed with summarization training and the graphic organizer construction process, and not the graphic organizer con- struction process alone, obtained higher mean scores on acquisition and recall measures.
Although Bean et al. (1986) did not examine the absence of the graphic organizer in a summarization condition only, their findings do support the findings of the current study (i.e., explicitness of instruction-aided students in generaliz- ing instruction to novel content). That is, the carefully designed and clearly stated instructional procedures improved students’ recall of novel content area text. In his review of studies comparing student-generated study aids, Anderson (1980) found similar results. The author conclud- ed that without explicit instruction in a procedure such as outlining, students performed as well by simply rereading the text. However, when explicit instruction was provided, study participants performed better than untrained peers did.
The presence of the graphic organizer appeared facilita- tive as well. Participants in the Im GO condition were pro- vided with teacher-constructed examples of the graphic organizers and were encouraged to develop their own graphic organizers as they saw fit. The teacher-constructed graphic organizers contained the most important informa- tion found within the text, with very few details included in the diagram. Students provided with these expert examples of the graphic organizers were able to transfer knowledge of these examples to novel textual material. Exactly how the transfer took place is speculative. Yet, the expert examples appeared to be what students needed to develop the ability to choose the main ideas embedded within the novel social studies material on South America.
In summary, the performance of students in the Ex GO, Ex No-GO, and Im GO conditions was statistically superi- or on the transfer measure to that of students in the tradi- tional instruction condition. It appears that the explicitness of instruction and the presence of the graphic organizer facilitated students’ retrieval when they read novel text silently to themselves. In other words, fifth graders in this study required a great deal of instructional support as repre- sented by the explicit conditions or little explicit instruction with the support of the graphic organizer (i.e., the Im GO condition) to comprehend novel textual material.
Concluding Remarks
Questions about the use of the graphic organizer as an instructional adjunct and the role of explicit instruction remain. A number of factors associated with the present study, including the dependent measures used, the nature of the treatments, and the length of the study, continue to bewilder us. Each of these concerns is addressed below.
We chose to use written free recalls in this study because of the unstructured nature of the measure. We hypothesized that by asking students to “write everything you can remember about Canada,” they might be prompted to use the explicit graphic organizer instruction independently, selecting the SMIUs on their own. Yet, a perusal of the means for all groups on the recall measures reveals that stu- dents recalled very few SMIUs. Twenty-two SMIUs were possible for the immediate and delayed measures of recall; the highest mean score was 6.350. For the transfer measure, 7 SMIUs were possible and the highest mean score on this measure was 1.952. Furthermore, the recall measure may not have been sensitive to the procedural knowledge gained by participants in the graphic organizer conditions. That is, directions given to students before writing did not prompt them to apply the strategy taught in the experiment. A mea- sure requiring students to actually use the strategy taught during the instructional sessions might have revealed greater facilitative effects of the graphic organizer.
Participants in the Ex No-GO, Im No-GO, and tradition- al instruction conditions were provided with study time fol- lowing the completion of each instructional session. These students had fewer procedures to master than the students in the graphic organizer conditions did and were allowed to spend more time studying (or thinking about) the content area information. At times, students in the Ex No-GO. Im No-GO, and traditional conditions were observed rehears- ing the text-based information silently to themselves. This added interaction with the text may have allowed students to engage in a deeper semantic processing of the textual information (Craik & Lockhart, 1972; Craik & Tulving, 1975). This observation led to the conclusion that comple- menting graphic organizer instruction with an instructional adjunct, whether it be with verbal rehearsal, summarization training (Bean et al., 1986), or explicit instruction, may be an important factor in the design of graphic organizer instruction and deserve further study.
Finally, it could also be argued that by modifying future graphic organizer studies to include a longer training period (i.e., longer than 10 days), students might be better able to accommodate the heavy procedural demands placed upon them when involved in instructional situations that require both declarative and procedural knowledge forms.
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APPENDIX
'Ransler Passage on South Ame~ica
South of middle America and the Caribbean lies the huge continent of South America. Much of South America's coastline is straight and even. There are a few bays and openings into the interior of the continent. For that reason it was difficult for early explorers to go very far inland from the coast. Even today little is known about some parts of the interior.
The chief physical features of South America are easy to understand. A range of giant mountains, the Andes, runs along the west coast. "bere is a narrow plain between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes. To the east of the mountains there are the wide plains and plateaus that make up most of South America.
Let us look more closely at these physical features. The Andes run along the west coast of South America for almost 5,000 miles (8,000 km). The Andes are among the highest mountains in the world. There are several peaks in this range that are higher than any in the United States. Very few roads and railroads cross the Andes. To the east of the Andes thm are two plateaus. The largest and highest
of the two is the plateau known as the Brazilian Highlands. The Brazilian Highlands are on the east side of the continent. The other plateau is known
the Guiana Highlands. The Guiana Highlands am in the northern part of the continent.
The plains of South America have been built by great rivers of the con- tinent. The plain of the Orinoco River lies between the Guiana Highlands and northern Andes. It is called the Llanos. LIMOS is Spanish for "plains."
Between the Guiana Highlands and the Brazilian Highlands is the plain of the Amazon River. This vast plain is very flat and stretches for thousands of miles. It is known as the Amazon Basin.
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