Effects of Three Types of Elaboration on Learning Concepts from Text

Two experiments were performed to evaluate the effects of three different elaborative activities on concept learning. Experiment 1 consisted of 60 undergraduates, while Experiment 2 consisted of 54 undergraduates. In both experiments, subjects studied a passage which asked them to create personal examples of the target concepts, contrast the target concepts, or expand on the effects of the target concepts. Subjects took a criterion test which consisted of recall of concept definitions and teaching examples, classification of novel examples, and problem solving scenarios. In both experiments, the condition which asked subjects to contrast the target concepts produced significantly better performance than the other two conditions. Possible explanations focus on: (1) the degree to which the different elaborative activities influence the richness and/or distinctiveness of the encoded information, and (2) the relation among the focus of the elaborative activity, the experimental text, and the measured criterion outcomes.