Research Questions

This study is mainly aimed at investigating the effects of a superordinate (introduced by means of a topic sentence) context on learning of young children and retention of facts.

The main research question is "Is the influence of the topic sentence exerted during the learning phase, or does it have its organizing effect during the retrieval phase, or both?"

Literature Review

The authors refer to Ausubel(1960,1968), Fitzgerald(1961) and Youssef(1963) in terms of retention and its dependence on general cognitive structures. They also refer to

Rothkopf(1968) and Bisbicos(1967) in terms of the effects of context and passages of meaningful material. One of the authors also refers to his own previous study Gagne(1969)

regarding superordinate contexts versus context containing coordinate facts. Therefore, the literature review coincides with the concept and context of what the authors are implementing

in their own research design and questions.

Methodology

This study involved forty-four fourth grade suburban schools students who were randomly assigned to four sub groups of equal number. There were two leaning conditions which

were sub divided into two different recall conditions. These learning conditions were called superordinate and coordinate, and the recall conditions had either a topic sentence present or absent.

There were five facts that the students needed to remember about the howling monkeys. In the superordinate learning condition a topic sentence was used as the first of five slides in a

topic followed by additional instruction. In the coordinate learning condition a sentence containing a related specific fact was used instead of the topic sentence without the additional instruction.

After the learning period(two days after) retention was measured and they took tests of retention of the facts they learned. I believe the methodology that was used is sound and in relation to

the research question because it is geared towards finding the effects of superordinate contexts.

Results

The results indicated that the topic sentence improves the remembering of facts when presented just before the retention test. Also, topic sentence seems to have an effect as an organizer in remembering.

Conclusions

The result of the study emphasizes the importance of the retrieval phase of  the remembering process and coincides with the results obtained in the previous study of Gagne(1969). However, the superordinate-coordinate difference between the subjects of the first study and the second study can be explained by the language development of young learners from fourth grade to fifth grade.

I think one of the most important aspects of this study is, its definition of topic sentence as an organizer and its results showing that introducing a topic sentence improves retention of given facts.