Semantic Organizations and Memory for Related Sentences

Sasson, Ralph Y.

doi:10.2307/1421362

Cited by 10 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…There are several logical structures that can be used to write jury instructions. Two organizational structures in particular, the "hierarchical" and the "algorithmic," have been shown to be extremely effective in classroom instruction (Briggs, 1968;Cunningham, 1971;Gagne, 1970;Greeno & Noreen, 1974;Merrill, 197t;Sasson, 1971;Tennyson, 1972). Under the "hierarchical" type of structure, high-level concepts are broken down into their lower-level components and are then integrated.…”

Section: Organizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Juridic decisions: In ignorance of the law or in light of it?

Elwork¹,

Sales²,

Alfini³

1977

Law and Human Behavior

120

134

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Pattern jury instructions have been criticized for being less than understandable to the average juror and thus for causing arbitrary juridic decisions. Two studies were conducted to establish whether these criticisms are justified and to find solutions to these problems. Both studies established the validity of the criticisms by demonstrating that the presentation of presently used Michigan negligence instructions is about as effective in helping jurors understand the laws as the presentation of no instructions at all. It was found that by rewriting these instructions in accordance with empirical knowledge of what elements affect perception, memory, and comprehension of language, their effectiveness was significantly improved. Furthermore, it was found that the presentation of instructions both at the beginning and at the end of a case would allow jurors a greater opportunity to focus their attention on relevant evidence and to remember it. The studies demonstrate the urgent need for jurisdictions around the country to improve the way jury instructions are written and delivered, Jf they expect jurors to reach verdicts in light of the law rather than in ignorance of it.

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Section: Organizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Juridic decisions: In ignorance of the law or in light of it?

Elwork¹,

Sales²,

Alfini³

1977

Law and Human Behavior

120

134

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show abstract

“…The order of sentences in such cases is thus dictated by the logical occurrence of the events described (Seliger, 1971). Sasson (1971) collected empirical data to show that temporal organizational sequence of sentences helps in recall. Greeno and Noreen (1974) found that when one part of a paragraph led to expectations about the content of later sentences in the paragraph, reading rates of later sentences increased.…”

Section: Organization Of Contentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving Comprehension for Jury Instructions

Sales

Elwork

Alfini³

1977

The Criminal Justice System

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“…In studies of the effects of these two forms of organization on learning (Kulhavy, Schmid, & Walker, 1977;Sasson, 1971), conceptual organization was superior to temporal organization of information. In the Sasson study, however, the texts were presented to subjects one word at a time in serial order.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Knowledge acquisition from newspaper stories∗

Thorndyke

1979

Discourse Processes

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Two experiments tested subjects' acquisition of the information found in newspaper stories. Subjects studied either an actual newspaper story or an altered form of the story constructed by deleting the irrelevant and redundant information and restructuring the remaining information into either a narrative, topical, or outline form. Subjects who studied the intact newspaper story learned little of the irrelevant and redundant information compared to the other information in the story. Presentation of any of the condensed versions of the story led to better recall than presentation of the entire news story. However, none of the structural reorganizations of the text information led to consistently superior recall relative to a passage that deleted the irrelevant information but maintained the news story structure. These results suggest that people may select among several alternative structural schemata for the representation of narrative passages in memory.The influence of text organizations on the acquisition of information from texts has received extensive treatment by educational and cognitive psychologists. Several studies have investigated the efficacy of various information organizations for learning. In a series of related studies (Frase, text passages were constructed from matrices of name-attribute-value triples. That is, a set of concepts in a semantic category was described using a fixed set of attributes, and each concept in the category had different values of the attribute. In general, these studies demonstrated that coherent organizations of the information (i.e., either by names or by attributes) produced better learning than did a random organization and that the two organizations produced equivalent levels of learning and better learning than a random organization. While name organization was a preferred or dominant learning strategy, attribute organization could be adopted if the to-be-learned texts were so structured.

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Semantic Organizations and Memory for Related Sentences

Cited by 10 publications

References 4 publications

Juridic decisions: In ignorance of the law or in light of it?

Juridic decisions: In ignorance of the law or in light of it?

Improving Comprehension for Jury Instructions

Knowledge acquisition from newspaper stories∗

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