Study should be meaningful to the learner for effective learning. The notion of ‘meaningful’ can be interpreted by two ways. Firstly, learners should be able to judge that contents to be learned are meaninful to their lives. If they evaluate learn...
Study should be meaningful to the learner for effective learning. The notion of ‘meaningful’ can be interpreted by two ways. Firstly, learners should be able to judge that contents to be learned are meaninful to their lives. If they evaluate learning contents are meaningful, they provide learners with interests and motivation. Secondly, contents should be learned in meaningful ways and processes. ‘The meaningful process’ means understanding the underlying meaning’s of contents. It also means that connecting with one’s background knowledge. Elaboration strategy is one of the learning strategies which focuses on contents or structures in many ways so that one can have better chance to retrieve those contents.
On the other hand, emotion is another crucial factor that affects memory. Existing body of literature suggestted that contents with higher emotional value tend to be remembered better than those with lower emotional value. In this study, it was postulated that emotional elaboration would have positive effects on recall or comprehension of texts. The question is whether or not it is better strategy for learning texts compare to cognitive elaboration. Researchers already know that cognitive elaboration is one of the best strategies to remember and understand texts.
However, this study assumes that emotional elaboration can be also useful strategy, because existing body of literature suggested that contents with higher emotional value tend to be remembered better than those with lower emotional value.
Another factor considered in this study was self-contextualization effect on text memory and comprehension. Self-contextualization refers to putting texts in learners' life contexts and situations. That is, this self-contextualization strategy can be understood as reinterpretations of texts in learners' perspectives.
To conduct the study, a text for one young lady's life story was chosen. The story itself was a real one, which she overcame her handicap of physical and social environments. As it was described above, two independent variables were elaboration type and self-contextualization and dependent variables were text recall and comprehension.
Total of 96 students attending at a university located in Seoul were volunteered to participate in this study. They were randomly assigned to one of four conditions; (1) cognitive elaboration with self-contextualization, (2) cognitive elaboration with no self-contextualization, (3) emotional elaboration with self-contextualization, (4) emotional elaboration with no self-contextualization. One hour long experiment was conducted. Before the experiment, all the students were tested about their affective intensity. All four conditions was not statistically significant on this affective intensity measure. Students in cognitive elaboration and emotional elaboration strategy condition received different text according to their elaboration condition. Students in self-contextualization condition also were asked to make story personal to their lives. After the experiment, immediate recall and comprehension tests were conducted and also a delayed test after one week was conducted. To test the hypotheses, two way ANCOVA were utilized.
The research results were as follows. Firstly, emotional elaboration was more effective than cognitive elaboration for the test of text memory and text comprehension. Secondly, for self-contextualization factor, there was no meaningful effect of self-contextualization for text memory and comprehension.
In this study, we confirmed that the effect of emotional elaboration was more effective in free recall task and cued recall task(text memory) than true of false task(text comprehension). And self-contextualization was not effective because it was not manipulated enough so that it can produce some experimental effects.
The results of this study gave us some important insights on emotional value of learning contents. Firstly, learning materials should be carefully designed so that students can have emotional elaboration effects. Secondly, learning materials should provide enough emotional contexts. Therefore, it would be better if it is rather a long interesting story that reveals emotional values. In this study, we examined effect of emotion not as a trait but as an affect of learning material. And we suggested utilization of affective value for discourse in actual learning context.