EFFECTS OF ELABORATIVE INTERROGATION WITH PROSE PASSAGES

Two hypotheses about the effectiveness of elaborative interrogation were investigated. First, students who engaged in elaborative interrogation while reading would remember more than those who underlined. Second, the characteristics of the students' elaborations would influence learning. Students (N = 114) in the 6th and 7th grades were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 conditions: underline-only, underline with elaboration, generate elaboration, and elaboration with study sheet. Generating an elaboration led to better memory for main ideas in comparison with the underline-only group, whereas the underline with elaboration group did better on an inference problem. Characteristics of elaborations did not influence the probability of learning the target fact.