USING ELABORATIVE INTERROGATION TO FACILITATE ACQUISITION OF FACTUAL INFORMATION IN COOPERATIVE LEARNING SETTINGS - ONE GOOD STRATEGY DESERVES ANOTHER

The primary purpose of this study was to determine whether providing 6 th-grade students with cooperative elaborative interrogation instructi on would facilitate learning relative to providing them with cooperati ve learning, elaborative interrogation or reading-for-understanding in structions. All students were presented with 36 factual statements abo ut six animals. Cooperative elaborative interrogation students were in structed to work collaboratively and use their prior knowledge to stat e why each fact is true. Cooperative learning students were told to wo rk collaboratively to learn target materials, while elaborative interr ogation students were instructed to generate answers to the why questi ons on their own. Reading-control students were also on their own and instructed to read the animal facts for understanding. For immediate f ree recall and immediate associative matching tests, students in the e xperimental conditions outperformed those in the control condition. Co operative elaborative interrogation and elaborative interrogation stud ents maintained this advantage on a 30-day follow-up associative match ing test, with elaborative interrogation students maintaining a signif icant advantage relative to reading controls on a 60-day associative m atching follow-up. (There was also a strong trend favouring the cooper ative elaborative interrogation condition on this 60-day measure.) The quality of the 'why' answer affected learning: Generating and listeni ng to scientifically correct answers that used relevant prior knowledg e to clarify target information was associated with better memory for facts than were other types of study responses. Students in this study learned the most when they were explicitly directed to activate relev ant prior knowledge that supports and clarifies new information-proces sing that occurs following either small-group or individual elaborativ e interrogation instruction.