Recall of passage details is most depressed when children receive both underlining and conceptual postquestions¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r2 · q3
Currency · newest study 1979 · checked against its sources 2026-10-20 (automated, 1 of 1 entry) · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q3 i? The combination of underlining and conceptual postquestions produced the lowest recall of passage details compared with the other condition combinations. → 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 · r2

Experimental finding from the N=69 study of ten-year-olds in which half received conceptual postquestions after every paragraph and children either generated underlining, received pre-underlined topic sentences, or received no underlining. Recall of details was "most depressed" under the combined condition.

"Recall of passage details was most depressed when children were provided with both underlining and conceptual postquestions"

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• 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 — the general claim this finding bears on, with the studies behind it
• Underlining and adjunct questions may hinder rather than help recall in young readers, reflecting a comprehension rather than a metacomprehension deficit — related
• Ten-year-old readers predominantly underline subordinate passage details rather than superordinate conceptual material, even when conceptual postquestions focus attention on topic sentences — related
• Highlighting shows low utility for improving learning outcomes — 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
• Adjunct aids such as learning objectives and embedded questions show limited effects and may interfere with competent readers' natural strategies — related
• Relevancy of emphasized text directs attention and influences test performance — related
• Engagement via annotation (underlining, highlighting, notes) shows no significant effect on comprehension — related