Ten-year-old readers predominantly underline subordinate passage details rather than superordinate conceptual material, even when conceptual postquestions focus attention on topic sentences¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r? · q3
Currency · newest study 1979 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q3 i? Young readers' self-generated underlining preponderantly targets subordinate, passage details rather than superordinate, conceptual material, even with conceptual postquestions focusing on topic sentences. → Rickards 1979

Evidence¶

Rickards 1979¶

Rickards, J.P., Denner, P.R. (1979). Depressive effects of underlining and adjunct questions on children's recall of text. Instructional Science, 8, 81–90. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00054983

q3 · i? · causal · r?

Experimental study of ten-year-old children (N=69) crossing postquestion presence with three underlining conditions. The reported result was that readers "preponderantly chose for underlining subordinate, passage details rather than superordinate, conceptual material" despite conceptual postquestions on topic sentences.

"the readers preponderantly chose for underlining subordinate, passage details rather than superordinate, conceptual material, even when given conceptual postquestions focusing on the topic sentences of the passage"

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Highlighting shows low utility for improving learning outcomes — a broader claim this one bears on
• Underlining and adjunct questions may hinder rather than help recall in young readers, reflecting a comprehension rather than a metacomprehension deficit — related
• Relevancy of emphasized text directs attention and influences test performance — related
• Learner highlighting of text gives a small memory benefit but no reliable comprehension benefit, and evidence on other forms of annotation is not yet recorded here — a broader claim this one bears on
• Across ten learning techniques, distributed practice and practice testing have the largest effects and underlining and summarization the smallest — a broader claim this one bears on
• Recall of passage details is most depressed when children receive both underlining and conceptual postquestions — related
• Engagement via annotation (underlining, highlighting, notes) shows no significant effect on comprehension — related
• In one experiment, students who generated their own underlining did not score significantly higher on tests than students given experimenter-generated underlining — related