A study examined the effect of headings and adjunct questions embedded in an expository test on the delayed multiple-choice test performance of 88 undergraduate students enrolled in psychology courses. The subject of the passage read by the students was the settling of Anglo America; the subheadings in the passage listed names of major subtopics serving to identify part-to-whole relationships within the passage. Subjects also completed an 18-question multiple-choice retention test that contained two explicit text-based questions for each of the major sections of the passage. The results indicated no specific facilitative effect of heading on the answering of multiple-choice questions about the information contained in the individual text segments preceded by the heading. In fact, in the case of detail retention test items, the inclusion of a heading for a text segment that was also followed by a question resulted in significantly poorer performance for some of the students. The results suggest that the appearance of any headings in the text may simply induce in subjects a strategy of trying to organize and interrelate the concepts in the text, and this strategy may then be applied to all sections of the passage regardless of whether they are preceded by a heading. (SRT)