ENG 574: Paragraph Organization of Written Materials - Sarah Felicelli

Frase, L.T. 1969. "Paragraph Organization of Written Materials: The Influence of Conceptual Clustering upon the Level and Organization of Recall." Journal of Educational Psychology. 60 (5): 394-401.

In this article Frase examines the effect of sentence organization in a document on reader recall. He explains in his literature review that if you rearrange sentences so that each sentence introduces a new concept or new terminology, it can affect the ability of the reader to both comprehend and recall information from the document. If you instead arrange sentences to allow for related information to be successively introduced, this should increase the reader's comprehension of the text.

In Frase's study, he introduced three versions of a text about the rules and pieces involved in playing chess to a group of women research participants. Each group received one of the three texts. Each participant read the text, took notes on what she had read, and re-read the text. Finally, the participants took a true-false test with questions about chess playing to determine their level of recall. Frase found that those texts where related sentences were close together resulted in a higher level of recall while the text that had disorganized sentences (introduced new material or information with each sentence) had lower recall. However, he also discovered that participants who read the disorganized text went about organizing it in their notes by linking related material. In the end, this decreased the amount of recall, because it took the reader longer to organize and learn the information in the text.

This article is extremely useful for my research topic; however, I have a few concerns about using it. The article, being published in 1969, is not very recent, and many relevant studies have taken place since it was published. Additionally, the methodology is a little suspect. The incentive for participants was based upon their ability to do well on the post-test. As quoted in the Procedure section of the article, "After the reading, I will ask you to evaluate some chess play and to indicate something about the chessmen. This will be a 30-item true-false exam. For every answer you get right above chance (15 right), I will give you 50 cents. You can thus win $7.50 if you learn the differences and similarities among the chessmen, and also how to apply this knowledge." Based on the readings in class about research with human subjects, this incentive appears to be extremely unfair. The participants did not have a choice in which study group they would be placed. If they were randomly chosen to be in the group with the disorganized text, they may not do as well on the post-test as those who were chosen to be in the organized text group (which was shown in the results of the study). The incentive for a study should not be merit-based, but, instead be the same regardless of their study group. Also, by only providing an incentive based on their ability to do well on the test, the results of the data could potentially be skewed. Participants may be overly motivated to do well on the test and could alter their studying, which may affect the results of the test. Based on these issues with the methodology of the study, I will not be using this article in the literature review of my report.