EFFECTS OF 3 TYPES OF ELABORATION ON LEARNING CONCEPTS FROM TEXT

Two experiments were performed to evaluate the effects of three differ ent elaborative activities on concept learning. Experiment 1 consisted of 60 undergraduates, while Experiment 2 consisted of 54 undergraduat es. In both experiments, subjects studied a passage which asked them t o create personal examples of the target concepts, contrast the target concepts, or expand on the effects of the target concepts. Subjects t ook a criterion test which consisted of recall of concept definitions and teaching examples, classification of novel examples, and problem s olving scenarios. In both experiments, the condition which asked subje cts to contrast the target concepts produced significantly better perf ormance than the other two conditions. Possible explanations focus on: (1) the degree to which the different elaborative activities influenc e the richness and/or distinctiveness of the encoded information, and (2) the relation among the focus of the elaborative activity, the expe rimental text, and the measured criterion outcomes. (C) 1997 Academic Press.