Passage cohesion showed no effect on delayed recall; means showed greater recall from less cohesive passages¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r? · q2
Currency · newest study 1981 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person
Evidence quality · No study behind this claim is a peer-reviewed article with a DOI: it rests on an ERIC document (a report, conference paper or thesis). It is kept because 2 design pages cite it; treat it as a lead to check, not an established finding.

Subclaims¶

q2 i? When familiarity and passage cohesion were independently varied, the data showed no effect of cohesion as defined, while the familiarity effect on delayed recall was found again. → Gagne 1981

Evidence¶

Gagne 1981¶

Gagne, Ellen D. (1981). Comprehension and the Long-Term Recall of Information. Final Report. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED221831

q2 · i? · causal · r?

In the study on text familiarity and cohesion, cohesion was defined as the degree of repetition of concept labels across sentences in the same passage, and familiarity and cohesion were independently varied. The report states the means showed "greater recall from the less cohesive passages".

"The data, while showing the effect of familiarity on delayed recall that had been previously found, showed no effect of cohesion as I defined it. In fact, the means showed greater recall from the less cohesive passages"

Discussion¶

Learner Variables¶

• Long-Term Memory — outcome: instruction changes it

Related Claims¶

• Prior Knowledge Determines New Learning — the general claim this finding bears on, with the studies behind it

• Linguistic simplification of math word problems can improve performance, particularly among English language learners and students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds — the general claim this finding bears on, with the studies behind it

• Passage familiarity (prior related knowledge) correlates .52 with recall, and only familiarity, not imageability, affected one-week delayed recall — related
• Text cohesion interacts with background knowledge: low-knowledge readers benefit from high cohesion, high-knowledge readers from low cohesion (reverse cohesion effect) — reports the opposite
• The prior knowledge of the intended audience determines a text's information density, rate of new information, and accompanying background — related