THE EFFECTS OF THREE QUESTION PROPERTIES ON PROSE MEMORY AND FORWARD TEXT PROCESSING.
Item
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Title
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THE EFFECTS OF THREE QUESTION PROPERTIES ON PROSE MEMORY AND FORWARD TEXT PROCESSING.
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Identifier
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AAI8103932
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identifier
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8103932
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Creator
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GOLDBERG, ELLEN S.
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Contributor
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Barry Zimmerman
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Date
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1980
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Education, Educational Psychology
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Abstract
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The purpose of this study was to explore how adjunct questions function to modify reading outcomes, and to interpret question effects in the context of attentional and processing models of reading behavior. The study examined effects of three question properties: (1) Specificity-multiple Specific prequestions asked for verbatim recall of text facts; (2) Organizing property-Concept Organizer prequestions provided superordinate topic information (concepts) and asked for related subordinate content (facts); (3) Constructive property-Concept Construction prequestions asked for derivation of superordinate concepts implicit but not stated in text. Questions were inserted before related paragraphs in the first half of the text sequence to measure the effects of each question property on immediate and delayed learning of text. The second half of the text sequence was presented without questions to examine the forward influence of each property on retention and processing of unquestioned text. It was hypothesized that all prequestions would facilitate learning relative to a reading-only control. Hypotheses were confirmed for multiple Specific questions, but higher-level questions did not significantly affect the level of text learning. Multiple Specific questions resulted in greater immediate learning than that produced by higher-level questions. This result is consistent with previous research, and demonstrates that the direct effect of specific questions may produce greater factual learning than the effect of general questions when amount of question-relevant text is controlled. Delayed learning showed no significant differences among question groups. Forward effects were examined by measuring immediate and delayed recall of facts from unquestioned paragraphs. Comparisons with a control failed to demonstrate positive transfer for any prequestion. The finding that all prequestions resulted in less factual recall than a control on immediate transfer resembles the depression of incidental learning reported frequently in the literature. The unanticipated outcome that all subjects recalled more facts from unquestioned paragraphs was clarified by results of analyses of recall from each paragraph. These analyses confirmed that recency and content-specific effects mediated effects of question treatment. Additional analyses of delayed data demonstrated that only Concept Organizer questions promoted representation of conceptual content in memory. These questions produced more concepts than a control on a delayed completion test which measured availability of concepts implicit in text. Subjects given Concept Organizer questions were more likely to recall conceptual content than factual content from questioned paragraphs, they freely recalled more concepts than any other group, and they outperformed a control in total recall from questioned paragraphs. An attentional model of question effects accounts fully for observed effects of specificity on factual text learning and for observed effects of higher-level questions. Concept Organizer questions influenced encoding strategies and subsequent recall strategies, but Concept Construction questions were not efficient in clarifying reading objectives so that they failed to promote use of a question-relevant strategy for encoding text content. Questions in this study did not demonstrate effects of organizational variables, and inconsistencies in question-level research do not warrant generalizable conclusions about the effect of questioning on level of text processing.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Education
