The Effects of Orienting Instructions on Readers' Ability to Recall Literal Information from Expository Texts

Abstract

This study aimed to examine whether instructing readers to judge text information can impair or facilitate their ability to recall information from expository texts of different genres. Experiment One used four expository texts and examined three types of orienting instructions: To answer pre-text questions, to be prepared to answer questions after the reading the text, to be prepared to judge the knowledge introduced in the text. The results of the study indicated that the use of pre-text questions did not improve readers’ performance in a recall test; in fact, they impaired the readers’ overall recall ability. However, being forewarned that they would be asked to provide a judgment on the information contained within a passage after reading it did enhance the participants’ ability to recall information from expository texts. Experiment 2 used the same four expository texts and examined the relationship between text recall and participants’ judgement of text information with particular cognitive abilities. The results reveal variations in the patterns of correlations between recall and rating of the text and other cognitive factors across the different text genres. The outcomes and implications of this research are discussed in this paper.