After reading prose passages, undergraduate students retrieved and reported information in either the oral mode or written mode of production. Current information processing models indicate that superordinate concepts are recalled better than subordinate ideas from a text. Thus, dependent variables were number of superordinate concepts recalled, number of subordinate ideas recalled, number of reader-generated elaborations, and time taken to respond in each mode. Recalls were scored against an outline, for presence or absence of superordinate, subordinate, and reader-generated ideas contained in the passages. Total number of superordinate concepts, subordinate ideas, or reader-generated elaborations yielded no differences across modes of reporting. However, initial or ending position of information in the original text produced significantly different results when subjects recalled in the oral mode versus the written mode.” For end position topics reported in the oral mode, when one level of concept was recalled without the other, it was always the subordinate concept that was recalled alone. These results have valuable implications for generative learning.
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