Effect of prose organization upon free recall.

Three experiments investigated effects of prose organization on free recall. Passages consisted of five paragraphs of five sentences each and described five attributes of each of five fictitious countries. Passages were organized either by name, by attribute, or randomly. Experiment I demonstrated significantly better recall under attribute than under name or random organization. Experiment II showed that only in the attribute condition is serial recall as good as free recall, suggesting that attribute subjects normally use serial order cues as a basis for retrieval. Experiment III verified this hypothesis; the superiority of the attribute condition in free recall is cancelled when serial order cues are unavailable. The importance of organization for recall has been repeatedly demonstrated (e.g., Gofer, 1965; Cohen, 1966; Tulving & Pearlstone, 1966). However, the majority of these studies have utilized only words or word lists as stimuli and have been concerned only with the comparison of blocked with randomized lists. Furthermore, the blocking has been in terms of categories that were presumably well established prior to the subject's introduction into the experiment, for example, minerals, animals, and flowers. The present research extends the list-recall work in several ways. First, simple prose materials are presented to subjects and the information to be remembered falls into categories that must be learned in the experiment. Second, the question is raised as to whether different types of nonrandom organizations of the materials are differentially effective, and if so, why. This question of the relative effectiveness of different types of nonrandom prose organizations should be of particular interest to educators. While we do not pretend that the