Underlining and adjunct questions may hinder rather than help recall in young readers, reflecting a comprehension rather than a metacomprehension deficit¶

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? The pattern of depressed recall under underlining and adjunct questions suggests a comprehension rather than a metacomprehension deficit in young readers. → 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?

The authors' interpretation of the N=69 experiment's results: the findings "suggested a comprehension rather than a metacomprehension deficit", with the aids possibly hindering recall. This is the authors' stated conclusion from the reported pattern.

"These results suggested a comprehension rather than a metacomprehension deficit, whereby underlining and adjunct questions may hinder rather than help recall performance in young readers"

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Ten-year-old readers predominantly underline subordinate passage details rather than superordinate conceptual material, even when conceptual postquestions focus attention on topic sentences — related
• Recall of passage details is most depressed when children receive both underlining and conceptual postquestions — related
• Question prompts improve learning — reports the opposite
• 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 — reports the opposite
• Adjunct aids such as learning objectives and embedded questions show limited effects and may interfere with competent readers' natural strategies — related
• Across ten learning techniques, distributed practice and practice testing have the largest effects and underlining and summarization the smallest — related
• Highlighting shows low utility for improving learning outcomes — a broader claim this one bears on