Abstract
When learning with elaborative interrogation, learners are requested by means of prompts to generate parts of the study material. There is evidence, that learning with elaborative interrogation is beneficial. However, it is conceivable that for elaborative interrogation to be beneficial for learning, learners also need resources available to be able to correctly generate parts of the study material. In this connection, one potentially important factor for successfully carrying out such effortful analytic processes, like generating information, is cognitive self-control. However, self-control seems to be a limited resource that can be depleted. Hence, under conditions of depleted self-regulatory resources (ego depletion), elaborative interrogation might lead to an incomplete generation of the requested information, resulting in incomplete study material. Thus, elaborative interrogation may be only beneficial under nondepleted conditions, but disadvantageous under depleted conditions. To investigate this, 97 persons were randomly assigned to one of four conditions resulting from a 2 × 2 between-subjects design with the independent variables ego depletion (yes vs. no) and learning condition (elaborative interrogation vs. control). Ego depletion was manipulated with a writing task: Participants were instructed to transcribe a text on a blank sheet, but only participants in the depletion condition were instructed to omit the letters e and n wherever they would normally appear in their writing. For the elaborative interrogation condition, some segments of the regular text were removed and prompts asking for that particular information were provided. For the control condition, the regular text was provided while no prompts were given. The main dependent variables were the learning outcome measures of a retention test and a transfer test. 2 × 2-ANCOVAs showed no effects of ego depletion, no effects of learning condition and no interaction between ego depletion and learning condition – neither for retention nor for transfer. The concept of ego depletion is recently discussed controversy and these results do contribute to the skeptical view that queries the impact of the concept of ego depletion – at least for cognitive tasks. Moreover, these results question whether elaborative interrogation are also desirable when assessing learning outcomes by means of retention and transfer tests.
Highlights
Overall, and as emphasized in different theoretical frameworks of learning and instruction, there is a general agreement that learners need to be actively involved in the learning process for gaining a better understanding of the instructional material (e.g., Chi, 2009; Mayer, 2009; Sweller et al, 2011)
Thereafter, the dependent variables manipulation check, subjective ratings of the learning phase, learning outcomes, and study time were analyzed by 2 × 2-AN(C)OVAs with the independent variables ego depletion and learning condition
The dependent variable performance in answering elaborative interrogation was analyzed by a one-factorial ANCOVA with the independent variable ego depletion, since only participants in the condition elaborative interrogation received these questions
Summary
As emphasized in different theoretical frameworks of learning and instruction, there is a general agreement that learners need to be actively involved in the learning process for gaining a better understanding of the instructional material (e.g., Chi, 2009; Mayer, 2009; Sweller et al, 2011). One global type of strategy is based on introducing challenges Such instructional strategies that aim at a better understanding of a content by making initial learning more difficult for a learner, can be subsumed to the framework of desirable difficulties (cf Bjork, 1994; Bjork and Bjork, 2011). To this framework belong conditions where parts of the information have to be generated by a learner (Bjork and Bjork, 2011). This in turn is supposed to result in a better comprehension of the learning contents (Craik and Lockhart, 1972)
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