Generation and precision of elaboration: Effects on intentional and incidental learning.

Abstract

Across three experiments adults were presented either base sentences containing arbitrary relations (e.g., The fat man read the sign) or base sentences accompanied by a precise elaboration that made clear the significance of the particular type of man doing the action {e.g., The fat man read the sign warning about thin ice). Subjects either read the sentence alone or answered a question accompanying the sentence. Why did that particular man do that? accompanied base sentences; How does the last part of the sentence make clear why that particular man did (hat? accompanied precisely elaborated sentences. Both intentional and incidental learning were studied. The positive effects of providing precise elaborations were moderate in size and confined to incidental learning. Much larger incidental and intentional learning gains followed generation of elaborations in response to questions, with generated precise elaborations facilitating acquisition slightly better than generated imprecise elaborations.Much contemporary cognitive research is directed at analysis of learning from written texts and verbal discourse (e.g., Bransford et al., 1982;van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). For instance, Stein, Bransford, and their associates (Stein & Bransford, 1979;Stein, Littlefield, Bransford, & Persampieri, 1984) reported a series of experiments in which adult subjects were presented with text that contained (a) arbitrary relations with intersentence confusions likely (base sentences), (b) elaborations that made the otherwise arbitrary relations more understandable (precise elaborations), or (c) elaborations that were consistent with the meaning of the sentence but did not clarify the significance of the relation specified in the sentence (imprecise elaborations). The following is a subset of Stein's and Bransford's base sentences:The hungry man got into the car. The strong man helped the woman. The brave man ran into the house.These arbitrary sentences can be expanded, however, with precise elaborations:The hungry man got into the car to go to the restaurant.

Learning with analogy and elaborative interrogation.

“…The idea that the positive effects of elaborative interrogation represent a generation effect (Pressley et al, 1987) does not appear to be supported. If requiring learners to generate information per se enhanced performance, then generating labeled schematics (in Experiment 1) should have produced improvements over a literal-text control.…”

“…Several explanations have been proposed for the mnemonic benefits (increased factual learning) of elaborative interrogation, including activation of congruent prior knowledge, heightened arousal, increased attention to content, and the process of generating information associated with the why question (i.e., a generation effect) or inducement of processing that is well matched to the criterial task (see Pressley et al, 1987, andWoloshyn et al, 1992, for amplification of these ideas). The idea that the positive effects of elaborative interrogation represent a generation effect (Pressley et al, 1987) does not appear to be supported.…”

“…Moreover, the particular knowledge presumably activated through elaborative interrogation is idiosyncratic for each learner, thereby perhaps allowing it to become more useful to the learner (in contrast to analogy, for which all learners might not have sufficient prior knowledge to extract and reason with the fundamental relations expressed in every analogy, cf. Pressley et al, 1987, for similar reasoning with regard to limited effects of experimenter-provided elaborations). Accordingly, we thought it possible that elaborative interrogation would prove to be a potent learning adjunct for fostering both factual and inference learning.…”

“…The elaborative interrogation method is a higher order questioning strategy (e.g., relative to other kinds of typically used adjunct questions that require learners to only report facts from the text; see Pressley, Tanenbaum, McDaniel, & Wood, 1990) that requires learners to explain why phenomena described in the text occur (Willoughby, Wood, & Khan, 1994). In earlier work with this technique, students were asked to read a simple factual statement and to answer a why question afterward to clarify the relation between the subject and predicate (Pressley, McDaniel, Turnure, Wood, & Ahmad, 1987). The elaborative interrogation students showed substantial increases over reading control groups in memory for the facts, and this finding has been replicated for a wide range of students (Seifert, 1993).…”

“…For instance, participants are typically presented with lists of facts to learn, with these facts presented as sets of sentences (e.g., Pressley et al, 1987;Pressley, Symons, McDaniel, Snyder, & Turnure, 1988) or arranged into paragraphs (Woloshyn, Willoughby, Wood, & Pressley, 1990). To our knowledge, only one published study (Seifert, 1993) has examined the learning effects of elaborative interrogation with more naturalistic prose passages (i.e., passages containing main ideas, detail facts, intersentential relations, etc.).…”