The effect of meaningful elaborations and summaries on the learning and retention of prose materials

This investigation was designed to compare the performance of students trained to use either meaningful elaboration or summarization with the performance of students in a control condition on short and long term recall.

Forty-five college juniors and seniors formed the two experimental and the control conditions. Students in the experimental conditions were trained to either summarize or create meaningful elaborations as they studied a text. Students in the control condition were told to use any strategy with which they felt comfortable. Subsequently, students in all three conditions completed a multiple-choice exam over an expository reading selection at interval of two days and again four weeks after training.

Analysis of covariance revealed that students in the control condition scored higher than students in either of the experimental condition on both tests of short or long term retention. However, students who had been trained to use meaningful elaborations experienced a smaller loss on their test scores between the short and long term recall.

Using Bloom's taxonomy of test questions which measure different types of cognitive levels, scores of the three groups were compared. The results showed that students in the control condition scored significantly higher than students in the meaningful elaboration condition on all four cognitive levels of the short term retention test and at the knowledge level on the long term retention test. Mean scores of students in the summarization condition and in the control condition were not significantly different for either the test of short term or long term recall.

Apparently students in the control condition already had effective strategies for remembering in their repertoire. These normally used study strategies were more efficient than the newly imposed strategies of summarization or meaningful elaboration.