Elaborative-Interrogation

In the article, “Elaborative-Interrogation and Prior-Knowledge Effects on Learning of facts,” Wolfgang Schneider acknowledges his research on factual learning strategies. According to Schneider, elaborative-interrogation is a learning method that promotes students to infer and elaborate about to-be-learned information by asking and answering “why” questions (1992). This way of learning is most effective when students have prior knowledge related to the new facts. Yet, even if students lack prior knowledge on their studying materials, there is a possibility for the elaborative-interrogation to improve learning because the process of responding to questions helps students to think more critically. This research was done because although it is
mandatory for most students to learn facts, acquiring the facts is often difficult. Moreover, Schneider’s objective of this research was to compare the size of the differences between mastering unfamiliar facts and familiar facts in three different learning conditions: the elaborative-interrogation, reading comprehension, and no exposure condition where participants do not learn any new facts.
The research was designed for 50 undergraduate students of the University of Western Ontario in Canada and 50 undergraduate students of the University of Munich in West Germany.
For at least 15 years, all 100 participants lived in their home country. Hence, they acquired more facts about their home country than the unaccustomed country. In order to test the participants’ prior knowledge about Canada and West Germany, 66 statements regarding facts about West German states and Canadian provinces, were created in both English and German. In addition, six extra statements were generated for practice use. Before study, the participants assigned to the elaborative-interrogation group were advised to answer out loud why the given facts correspond to the discussed province or state in 10 seconds, whereas the reading-to-understand students were asked to read the sentences audibly at a speed that they can properly perceive the information. During presentation of the facts, the average number of times the reading-to-understanding participants read the statements was 1.85 times. Besides, some responses of the elaborative-interrogation group were inadequate as they lacked clear explanations, but most participants were capable to give adequate responses. With practice statements, the participants had opportunities to show their approaches to the statements and they were given some advices and examples of acceptable response. After, to test incidental learning, these two groups viewed the sequences of the questions about countries and the true facts about two countries prior to the test. However, no-exposure group was not presented with any facts to check how well the participants perform on the test with only their prior knowledge. In a laboratory, the participants were individually tested to match the facts with the names of the province or
state.
As a result, participants in instructional conditions with prior knowledge produced better matching than those who lacked a knowledge base. However, the research found that the participants in the elaborative-interrogation condition obtained better results on the matching test than the two other groups regardless of the level of prior knowledge. In short, this indicates that when people have high prior knowledge related to the future learning materials, the why questions trigger the increase in performance. Likewise, when people have low prior knowledge, their attempts to answer the why questions helped their performance because it increased their knowledge activation and attention to the facts. Consequently, the findings are important because they emphasize how the elaborative-interrogation effectively facilitates learning and thus, encourage students to use such strategy as frequently as possible.