Effects of Importance and Interest on Recall of Biographical Text

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate two characteristics of texts—structural importance and text-based interest—that affect what students remember from their reading. Two experiments were conducted. In the first, college students rated sentences in a biographical text for both interest and importance, which were found to be highly related. As a result, four categories of sentences were established: high importance/high interest (the main ideas), high importance/low interest (supporting details), low importance/high interest (seductive details), and low importance/low interest (common events in a person's life history that are unrelated to the main ideas). The second experiment examined the recall of an equivalent group of college students, either immediately after reading the passage or one week later. Interest was found to have a powerful effect on recall for both good and poorer readers. The two categories of information that were best remembered were seductive details and main ideas, both of which had been rated as interesting. Least well remembered were the details supporting the main ideas, which had been rated as important but uninteresting.