Knowledge Organization and Text Organization

In Experiment 1, students studied an outline providing relevant background knowledge before reading an experimental text. This outline was organized either consistently or inconsistently with the structure of the text. Then participants performed a variety of tasks, either immediately or at a 2-day delay. Consistent-outline students performed better than the inconsistent-outline students on cued-recall and recognition tasks, they wrote summaries more closely following textual order, and they produced a smaller number of intrusions from the outline material. The inconsistent-outline condition did not lead to poorer performance overall, however. Students in this condition showed superior performance on inference verifications as well as on difficult, creative problem-solving tests that required a deeper understanding of the material. The results suggest that different levels of test-taking performance may depend on different forms of memory representation. Experiments 2 and 3 rule out alternative interpretations of the data.