Structure building differences influence learning from educational text: Effects on encoding, retention, and metacognitive control

Abstract

Structure building describes the process by which people mentally organize information while reading to comprehend and later recall text. We investigated how individual differences in structure building ability affect students' learning of complex, educational texts. College students studied a complex text with a mechanical theme, engaged in retrieval practice, made metamemory judgments, and then were given another study opportunity. Following a short delay, memory and comprehension of the text were assessed with a range of dependent measures, including performance on free recall, multiple-choice questions, and problem-solving questions. Participants with high structure building ability outperformed those with low structure building ability on information recalled, factual and inference multiple-choice questions, and problem solving questions. Although high and low structure builders demonstrated equivalent metamemory accuracy, high structure builders appear to better regulate their restudy time according to a discrepancy reduction strategy, which allowed them to acquire more new information that they were unable to retrieve initially during recitation. Our findings suggest that low structure builders may suffer from deficiencies at many levels of text representations as well as deficiencies in metacognitive control during restudy. Our study highlights structure building ability as an important individual difference for learning educational texts and furthers our understanding of exactly what aspects of learning are related to these differences.