Imagery training and children's prose learning.

Used a pretest-posttest design to examine the effects of passage-illustration training (relative to a reading-practice control procedure) on reading comprehension in 10 3rd and 22 4th graders. Without this imagery training, imagery instructions did not improve performance on either a standardized reading comprehension test or a paraphrase prose recall procedure. After extended training in drawing adequate "comic strips" to illustrate prose passages, performance in a paraphrase recall task improved, but only when explicit imagery instructions were given with the task. The imagery training did not affect the standardized test performance, explicit imagery instructions notwithstanding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)