The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a comparative advance organizer in an oral format on learners' immediate and delayed retention of subject matter related to food and nutrition when controlling for learners' prior knowledge level. Another area of interest was to investigate whether paraphrasing the comparative advance organizer prior to receiving oral instruction would be an effective strategy to help learners when encoding an advance organizer and the subsequent material. Thirty-two high school students in two food service classes in Alabama provided the sample for the study. Subjects were tested for prior knowledge of foods and nutrition and then randomly assigned to one of three treatment conditions: (1) oral comparative advance organizer, treatment one; (2) oral comparative advance organizer plus paraphrasing, treatment two; and (3) no oral comparative advance organizer, treatment three. The advance organizer was a 239-word introductory passage that incorporated the theory of meaningful verbal learning of D. Ausubel (1963). An analysis of co-variance was used with prior knowledge level as the co-variate to determine whether there were significant differences between treatment groups after controlling for prior knowledge. Findings show that no single treatment condition was more effective in facilitating immediate and delayed retention of text. In addition, subjects paraphrasing the comparative advance organizer did not show a positive influence on recall of the subject matter. (Contains 7 tables and 39 references.) (SLD)