Hierarchical Importance of Pre-Passage Questions: Effects on Cued Recall

Abstract

This experiment compared the effects of pre-passage questions that quizzed information of different structural importance on college students' cued recall of expository prose passages. Among higher-vocabulary subjects, cued recall of detail information not specifically quizzed by the pre-passage questions was significantly greater in the condition in which pre-passage questions quizzed a detail unit than in the higher-level pre-passage question condition or the no pre-passage question condition, p < .05. These findings suggest that lowerlevel pre-passage questions do facilitate encoding of related details for subjects of certain ability levels, and that earlier findings showing a facilitation of free recall by higher-level pre-passage questions, but not by lower-level pre-passage questions, reflect primarily a retrieval phenomenon. However, the results also indicate that lower-level pre-passage questions are specific in their facilitative effects and do not promote memory for related main ideas.Recent research (Wilhite, 1983) has shown that the effect of pre-passage questions on the retention of indirect (i.e., non-quizzed) material depends on the structural importance of the information being quizzed. Specifically, Wilhite found that questions quizzing higher-level main ideas facilitated the free recall of related main ideas compared to a no-question control condition, whereas questions quizzing lower-level details in the passage did not facilitate recall of related main ideas. Neither higher-level nor lower-level questions significantly affected recall of indirect details.One possible interpretation of these results is that higher-level questions are more likely to encourage encoding of related information than are lowerlevel questions. In recent experiments by Reynolds and his associates

A comparative study of the effect of two pre-reading formats on L2 reading comprehension

“…Research in the areas of Ll content learning and reading development has shown that the effective use of pre-reading strategies calls for attention to a wide range of factors, from the level of cognitive development and favoured learning strategies of the target learners (Snow and Lohman, 1984) to the structure of the learning material and the place the target information has in it (Wilhite, 1984). The situation is unlikely to be any simpler in L2 reading, but with the added variable of language proficiency.…”

The Relationship of Headings, Questions, and Locus of Control to Multiple-Choice Test Performance

“…Recently, Wilhite (1982Wilhite ( , 1985 has suggested that postpassage questions (i.e., questions appearing after the passage segment containing the answer) facilitate indirect retention by inducing a cognitive review of the passage that involves either a top-down search of the hierarchical memory representation of the passage or a spread of activation from the passage memory unit directly accessed by the adjunct question. In addition, Wilhite (1983Wilhite ( , 1984 has argued that prepassage questions (i.e., questions appearing before the passage segment containing the answer) facilitate indirect retention by encouraging the encoding of information related to the question and by serving as self-generated retrieval cues at the time of the retention test. With regard to the effects of headings, Brooks et al (1983) have suggested that headings can act as advance organizers by activating schema relevant to the given topic, by encouraging the interrelating of concepts in the text, and by providing cues for subsequent retrieval.…”

“…However, there are also reasons to believe that the processing induced by the two types of textual aids is not identical. For example, in Wilhite's (1982Wilhite's ( , 1983Wilhite's ( , 1984Wilhite's ( , 1985 research on adjunct questions, he employed verbatim questions that quizzed specific information in the passage, whereas most research on headings (see, for example, Hartley & Trueman, 1983) appears to have employed words or statements intended to indicate the main topic of the following material. Therefore, in situations in which the adjunct questions quiz specific passage information and the headings identify main topics, the organizational effects of headings should be more general than that of the questions.…”

Evidence of a negative environmental reinstatement effect

“…The to-be-remembered passage was a 724-word passage on colour change in leaves used in previous research (e.g. Wilhite, 1982Wilhite, , 1983Wilhite, , 1984. The passage was based on portions of a National Forest Service brochure (USDA, 1967) and was constructed so as to be highly hierarchically organized.…”