Schema and Scaffolding: Testing Advance Organizers’ Effect on Secondary Students’ Reading Comprehension

Abstract

This study examined an instructional method that combined scaffolding and Schema Theory to address the reading comprehension of 105 urban high school students. Participants in the treatment condition read a pair of advance organizers and were asked to paraphrase them in writing to stimulate durable memory representation prior to reading the main passages. Students were assessed on their comprehension of both a narrative and an essay to measure treatment effects across text genres. Low level readers were expected to show greater benefits. Both high and low level readers from the treatment group benefited from the advance information on both passages. The results suggest that comprehension may be readily addressed via schema activation through advance organizers paired with cognitive strategies designed to assist with the encoding of information into long term memory.