Additive Effects From Interspersed Arilurct Cuestions In Prose Text
A total of 150 undergraduate students randomly assigned to five experiment .1 groups studied ten paragraphs with questions intrspersej at different locations in the text. Performance en incidental items was significantly lower (p<0_05) in the question before (QB) than in the ;uestion after (QA) question before and after (QBA) and the noquestion (NoQ) groups. Performance on intentional items by the QB subjects was significantly lower (p<0.05) than the QA and QBA subjects. The results also suggest that (a) the Q3 and QA effects of questions combine additively to produce the performance of the QBA subjects, and (b) the attenti vn operation is equivalent across conditions for intentional itemn, but differs in retention operation. This nay mean that depth of processing is the relevant operation to focus upon. During the past decades of research on mathemagenic behaviors, at least three theoretical orientations have emerged to explain iliffential outcomes of variables associated with the type and placement of adjunct questions: (1) The "mathemagenic behaviors" view, introduced :y Rothkopf (1965) claims that the learners' inspection behaviors are adaptive and shaped by extinguishing nonproductive (unsuccessful) behavior and strengthening productive (successful) behaviors. (2) The cybernetic model (Frase, 1969) suggests that the learner determines whether or not achieved behavior (what is place is memory) coincides with the terminal criterion. (the correct answer) The consequence of positive feedback is maintenance of the successful strategy, whereas the consequence of negative feedback (failure to answer test questions correctly) is alteration of the strategy applied to subsequent paragraphs. (3) A third framework hypothesizes the existence of two operations (Poyd, 1973) (a) attention, that is, the process of putting information into some form of storage which becomes operational in immediate or nearly immediate recall of intormition; and (h) retentinn, that is, holding the material in storage over time. The latter frameword (Eoyd's) is the one within which the present study was conducted. This position indicates that preguestions cue the learner to attend more to intentional material than to incidental material, but the forgetting rate for both types of material will be the same once the material has been stored. Accordingly, prequestions are assumed to influence selective attention but not selective forgetting. Postquestions, on the other hand, are said not to influence attention and retention of incidental material any differently than the roquestion treatment, but do enhance retention and the retrieval of intentional material. On the basis of such considerations, and evidence supporting them, Boyd speculated that the combination of preand postquestions should be additive in its effects. Thus, if prequestions increase a subject's attention for intentional material and postquestions' retard the rate of forgetting tor material attended to, then the effect of giving a set of prequestions with identical postquestions should ho to increase intention t posttest scores more than a set of preor postquestions alone (p. 32) Support for this view was obtained through the failure to find an interaction hetween type of learning and average performance on an eleven treatment matrix. Based on the attitive model proposed by Boyd, we were concerned in the present study, with the combined effects of pre ani postquestions. Our hypothesis was that the combination of preand postquestions would result in performance un a posttest which was equivalent to performance attributable to prequestions alone, plus performance attributable to postquestions alone. In order to test this hypothesis adequately, several methodological provisions, most of which have been neglected in previous studies, were incorporated into the design and procedures. These provisions were as follows: 1. In order to enhance the generalizability of results to a general college population, a heterogeneous sample of college students from a variety of sources, (i.e. majors, colleges, sex, and year in school) were enlisted as subjects. In this regard, we note that sampling in the past was often made from homocleneous target populations such as college suphomores in introductory psychology, office workers, or paid volunteers. To further enhance generalizability, the tasks in the present study were administered under naturalistic study conditions. 2. The items for the adjunct questions and for the criterion tests were selected at random from an item pool which represented the knowledge domain of the entire passage. The result of this procedure was that 30 different forms of the test were employed and these were randomly administered to subjects. 3. Defined procedures were employed in the placement of adjunct questions within the text. The same items were used across the five experimental treat:aent.s (i.e. same question was the preguestion in the QB condition, was the postquestion in the QA condition and was the prequestion in the QBA condition. The QBA condition also had a different randomly selected item place after the passage. The posttests were the same across the five treatments. 4. In order to provide for comparison of results with previous studies, provision was made for replication of basic effects in the design. Stimulas M.zterial and Item Selection Procedure The reading passage was approximately 800 words long and dealt with the topic of vitamins. It was divided into ten paragraphs, each of which was comprised of seven sentences. Each sentence contained a single main idea. Open ended questions which could be correctly answered with one tothree words were constructed for each of the 70 sentence! thereby defining a large percentage, if not all, of the population or "domain" of ideas represented in the passage. Each paragraph contributed seven questions to the item pool. They will be considered subpools of questions representing "subdonains" of ideas. Through the use of computer teXt processing programs, forty Iuestions were randomly selected from the domain of items for the adjunct questions and for the postreading criterion measure. A set of forty items equally represented (n=4) each of the ten paragraphs or sub:onains. The randomization procedure specified the random namber generator to repeat questions across treatments. The order of the ,iuesti.or.s in the criterion measure was further randomized to reduce the likelihood that any one item could be answered because of primacy or recency effects, because .it duplicated the sequence of material within the passage, or because of other similar but unidentified artifactual effect. Each subject within a given condition received a unique set of questions but the same set of questions appeared across conditions, thereby, providing i replication of items across treatments. As already indicated, this procedure resulted in thirty different forms of the test and sets of adjunct questions. Procedure Students enlisted for an experimental session convenient to their study schedules. General instructions were liven to a group of subjects (ranging tram 5 7 students) after which each found a place where he/she could be alone and might be comfortable studying (this could conceivably he ones residence hall room) As each subject fi,nishrd studying the self administered stimulus material, he/she exchanged it for the criterion measure. Subjects were "closc.ly" monitored to ensure that directions were being followed. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS The initial concern was, to test if the criterion measure produced by the random item selection procedure were equivalent. The 30 x 5 ANOVA failed to reject the hypothesis of equivalent tests (all p's were greater than 0.58) Since the hypothesis of equivalent criterion measures cannot be rejected, neither can we reject the hypothesis that the item selection procedure produced equivalent test. The importance of this finding is that the results cannot be attributed to test biases, but may be attributed to the treatment to which each subject was expose 1. Closely associated with equivalent tests was the necessity to determine whether the materials were appropriate for the target population, as well as to identify the knowledge base of the topic for this population. The "test only" scores (Table 1) proved to be significantly lower (p<0.01) than the remaining scores. The "test only" subjects are therefore considered a control group. Likewise, we can assume that any change from this population base knowledge is attributable to the particular treatment to which subjects were exposed. A second concern was, 'ihether our data could replicate the differential effects produced by previous investigators with respect to intentional and incidental performance scores. A 2 x 4 ANOVA with two levels of type of learniii (intentional ani inci1ental) and four levels of questionplacement was conducted. A significant interaction of the two variables yielded, P (3, 116) 19. 96, p<0.01. Therefore, follow up procedures, via the Newman Keuls Tests, were used to test for simple effects in order to detect the loci of the interaction. Intentional learning performance was found to be significantly higher (p<0.01) than incidental learning performance for all groups (except for the NoQ group, of course) The same analysis as above vas carried out excluding the NoQ condition, indicated no interaction but a significant difference resulted (p<0.01) between intentional and incidental effects for all groups (Figure 1) In concert with past findings, no significant differences resulted on intenticnal scores between QA and QBA but were significantly different than the QB scores. For the incidental scores, the QB group again performed significantly lower (p<0.05) than the remaining groups. The incidental scores of the subjects in the NoQ, QA and OBA were found to be equal to the NoQ and QB scores. Within the