Many students face the challenge of developing effective ways to learn and remember factual information. And it is well-known that all the bases of the information processing are built upon these factual information. In Korea many people emphasize the...
Many students face the challenge of developing effective ways to learn and remember factual information. And it is well-known that all the bases of the information processing are built upon these factual information. In Korea many people emphasize the need to develop the educational excellence but the development of the effective, concrete ways of study is in the poor station, and it is hard to find out a paper about the elaborative interrogation as an efficient study strategy. So there is the need for this study.
Prior knowledge as a mediator of the effectiveness of the elaborative interrogation strategy was evaluated in this study. And the five concrete problems of the study are selected for this study. They are as follows :
1)How does it effect on the task performance to provide informations on the learning task?
2)How does it effect on the task performance to treat elaborative interrogation by the familiarity degree of the learning material?
3)How does it effect on the task performance to treat elaborative interrogation by the test-time of the learning material?
4)What relation is there between the quality of Why-answering and memory performance by the familiarity degree of the learning material?
5)What relation is there between the quality of Why-answering and memory performance by the test-time of the learning material?
For this experiment, the experimenter utilized 5 familiar and 5 unfamiliar, exotic animals as material: lion, tiger, fox, elephant, hippo, lycaon, coyote, pronghorn, okapi, tapir. The first-grade high school students were given facts about animals and instructed either to answer "Why" each fact would be true of the particular animal being discussed(in the case of "elaborative interrogation") or to read each fact aloud at a rate so that they could understand it (in the case of "repetition control"). Half of the animals were familiar to the students and the other half were exotic and unfamiliar.
The elaborative interrogation group outperformed the repetition control group on an memory test for both the familiar and unfamiliar animals, both on an immediate post-test and on an 1-month-delayed post-test. But in the prior study of T. Willoughby et al.(1993) the one outperformed the other for the familiar animals only, and did not for the unfamiliar animals. Maybe that's why there is some differences in the subjects and the items.
To facilitate memory of facts, the elaborative interrogation strategy requires general knowledge related to the to-be learned content. Instrutions are important from a pragmatic perspective as well. Elaborative interrogation is a strategy that should be recommended for learning content from familiar domains. But it's important that no significant benefits resulted from using elaborative interrogation when prior knowledge was low.
And this study provided a significant evidence of both elaborative interrogation and prior knowledge on an learning, as well as information on the ways in which the two factors can operate together to increase performance to a level higher than that produced by either factor operation alone.
By this study we can know that the elaborative interrogation strategy and prior knowledge are so important in learning and also it's important for learners to have correct elaboration.
The durability of the elaborative interrogation was measured by the same matching test which was tested one month before. As the result, the positive effect of the elaborative interrogation group versus the repetition control group bolsters the robustness and usefulness of the educational effect.
I'd like to suggest one thing. I think it's difficult for the teachers who are busy, pressed with miscellaneous duties and don't have so excellent quality to develop many various, high-leveled elaborative interrogation problems. Therefore I think there should be some educational institute which can provide many deep, professional, various and high-leveled items to the whole country teachers.
Also, the elaboration is not a simple strategy for learning, but a significant strategy that can free people from ignorance, roughness and prevent men from diverse accidents in life. Therefore, I think it needs to study the elaboration strategy from all fields.