Elaborate Analogies in Science Text: Tools for Enhancing Preservice Teachers\u27 Knowledge and Attitudes

Preservice teachers studied texts about three fundamentally important science concepts. They read versions with no analogy, versions with a simple analogy, and versions with an elaborate analogy. An elaborate analogy is one that consists of text and pictorial components in which similarities between the analog and the target concept are made explicit. Verbal and imagery processes combine to promote a mapping of conceptual features. The findings indicated that elaborate analogies improved the science knowledge and attitudes of preservice teachers by relating what is familiar to what is new. The findings are consistent with a constructivist view of learning science and suggest that science texts for preservice teachers should be adapted to take advantage of elaborate analogies in a systematic way

Text-Comprehension Strategies Based on Outlines: Immediate and Long-Term Effects

Prior to studying an instructional text, college students were given either a topically relevant outline or a topically irrelevant (control) outline and asked to generate propositions about the topics by drawing upon their existing knowledge. The results indicate that comprehension was highest among those students who activated relevant prior knowledge before text study, and who were again provided with an outline of that knowledge during testing. The measure of comprehension used here was total meaningful recall: It included text propositions plus valid elaborations based on the interaction of text information and students\u27 existing knowledge. The results of conceptual clustering analyses suggest that organization was one of the mechanisms by which topical outlines increased meaningful recall. Additional analyses conducted only on the elaborations indicate that students produced more of them during long-term (six week) recall than during immediate recall