Isolating variables that impact on or detract from the effectiveness of elaboration strategies.

Abstract

The role of prior knowledge in elaboration strategies was examined in 3 experiments. University students were presented with material that accessed either a highly developed or a less developed knowledge base and instructed to answer why questions (elaborative interrogation), create interactive images (imagery), create interactive images using keywords (keyword), or read the information aloud (repetition). Across all 3 experiments, elaborative interrogation was most effective when learners were able to draw on a rich knowledge base. However, when the knowledge base was low, imagery-based strategies were more potent than elaborative interrogation. These results suggest that creating mental images encourages the processing of both relations and distinctions to a greater extent than elaborative interrogation when the learners' background knowledge is limited. Many studies have demonstrated that new information can be made more memorable if learners create meaningful elaborations (e.g., Stein, Morris, & Bransford, 1978). Presumably, when creating meaningful associations, learners search their available knowledge and use that information to connect novel to-be-learned materials. Elaborative interrogation is one higher order questioning strategy that is thought to enhance the learning of facts by encouraging students to connect novel information to their own richly developed knowledge base. Instead of simply presenting students with facts to learn, students are asked to answer a why question for each fact (e.g., Why would that fact be true?). A series of studies has demonstrated the potency of this strategy for both child and adult populations across a variety of fact-learning tasks (see Pressley et al., 1992, for a review). In this article we investigate how elaborative interrogation operates to achieve such strong learning effects.