No abstract

We investigated whether memory for scientific arguments and their sources were affected by the appropriateness of the claim -evidence relationship. Undergraduates read health articles in one of four conditions derived by crossing claim type (causal with definite qualifier, associative with tentative qualifier) and evidence type (experimental, correlational). This manipulation produced articles that overstated the results of a study and articles that understated their results, along with appropriate controls for each. We found that evidence and, to a lesser extent, source information was recalled more poorly for articles that overstated results (i.e., causal claims using correlational evidence) than for those where evidence was appropriate (i.e., causal claim with experimental evidence). Readers rejected these overstatements based on the study design rather than reprocessing the text. In contrast, understatements (tentative claim, experimental evidence) were recalled just as well as their appropriate control; however, the target content was reprocessed at a higher rate. These findings suggest that readers may remember an inappropriate definite conclusion but fail to recall the evidence used to support it.

When learning about a historical topic, students must be able to work with information from multiple sources. In order to successfully integrate information across sources, students must understand the temporal structure of the events across documents (contextualization) and compare sources for consistent and conflicting information (corroboration). Three experiments examined how contextualization could be enhanced through the use of timelines and how corroboration could be enhanced through the use of inquiry-based essay prompts. A positionbased essay prompt focused on evaluation of a specific cause while the contributing-factors essay prompt focused on explanation of the causes. Experiment 1 found that generating a timeline during learning did not improve essay quality compared to a read-only control. Although the position-based essay prompt was especially interesting to undergraduate students, it led to less coverage of concepts in the essays compared to an explanation-based essay prompt. Experiment 2 found a similar pattern of decreased coverage with the position-based prompts for high school students. Experiment 3 added a recognition test to serve as a learning measure, and found that younger students learned more after generating a timeline during reading compared to a read-only control. Taken together, these findings suggest that timelines may enhance learning, but only for younger students. Furthermore, the results illustrate that different writing tasks affect students' likelihood of synthesizing information across sources and their learning outcomes.