Material appropriate processing and elaboration: The impact of balanced and complementary types of processing on...

The Material Appropriate Processing (MAP) framework suggests that the influence of a text adjunct on the learning and transfer of textual information will be moderated by the overlap between type of processing induced by the adjunct and by the organisation of the text. The two types of processing are item specific processing and relational processing. Although complementary types of processing have been found to produce superior concept learning effects in previous research, there is some question as to the effects of complementary but unbalanced processing.

This study examined the effects of different combinations of two types of text adjuncts (i.e., elaborative activities) and two types of text on learning concepts from text. The four combined treatments differed as to the degree to which they were balanced and/or complementary.

Participants were 80 undergraduate students who were enrolled in a Year 3 education paper.

Students studied a passage that included adjuncts which asked them to either: (a) create personal examples of target concepts, or (b) contrast the target concepts. In addition, two versions of text were paired with these adjuncts: specific-only text and specific/relational text. Subjects took a criterion test that consisted of cued recall of definitions, free recall of text, classification of novel examples, and problem solving.

Best performance occurred within the condition that included balanced and complementary processing of text/adjunct information, and worst performance occurred in the condition that included non-complementary processing.

Although these results are consistent with a MAP perspective, the results are equivocal about the potential interfering effects of complementary and unbalanced processing on learning of concepts from text.