Two experiments were conducted (a) to evaluate how providing background information at test may benefit retrieval and (b) to further examine how providing background information prior to study influences encoding. Half of the participants read background information prior to study, and the other half did not. In each group, half were presented with background information at test. Background information at test improved recall for those who did not read information prior to study. Results from Experiment 2 suggested that this improvement was due to background information providing content cues to retrieve specific ideas from the text rather than topic cues to support top-down recall. Concerning encoding effects, secondary measures and construction-integration modeling of free recall support the hypothesis that background information presented prior to study influences the effectiveness of organizational processing during encoding.