Evaluation

The NRP located seven studies that experimentally examined mental imagery training.

Grade Level

Imagery has been used in studies at all grade levels higher than the 2nd grade.  The distribution of grades studied was: grade level 2 n= 1, level 3 n=2, level 4 n= 2, level 5 n= 1, level 7 n= 1, and level 8 n=1. Mental imagery instruction while reading sentences appears to be applicable to grades 2 through 8.

Experimenter Tests

The main effect of imagery is to increase memory for the sentence imaged.  The main memory tests used were recall (3 studies) and question answering (6 studies).  Keyword cues were used as prompts in 5 of these studies. In addition, detection of inconsistency showed improvement in two studies.

Summary Evaluation of Mental Imagery Instruction. 

Instructing readers to imagine what they are reading and coding what they imagine with a keyword cue facilitates readers' memory what they have read. This method is useful for imagining the referents of individual sentences.