Selection and Recall of Topical Information in Prose by Better and Poorer Readers

Abstract

SUPPORT FOR THE SELECTIVE PROCESSING of information presented in prose passages is found with 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, 14 better and 14 poorer readers among college students judged the importance of certain statements about the topic or theme of a paragraph as well as statements that were not about topical concepts of the paragraph. Differences in how the better readers rated the importance of statements about the topic over statements about non-topical concepts were significantly greater than differences in the ratings of poorer readers. Sixteen and 16 poor readers were tested for recall of topical and non-topical information in Experiment 2. Better readers showed recall of information about the topic that was superior to their recall of non-topical information; no such differences were found for poorer readers. It is argued that good readers evaluate information presented in the paragraph with respect to its relevance to the topic, and tend to process this information at the expense of information about non-topical concepts. For poorer readers, these distinctions are less apparent.