The Development and Evaluation of a Self-Questioning Study Technique

The main purpose of these two studies was to determine whether or not generating good comprehension questions while studying prose material was an effective study technique.In the first study there were two treatment groups to which the high school seniors participating in the study were randomly assigned: a questioning-with-training or a read-reread control group.In the second study high school juniors and seniors were randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups: a questioning-with-training group, an untrained questioning group, or a read-reread control group.Verbal ability, as measured by the Wide Range Vocabulary Test (French, Ekstrom, & Price, 1963), was used to group subjects ex post facto into three levels of verbal ability.Two sessions of approximately 50 minutes each were used for training and testing the subjects.The first day was devoted to training the experimental groups and administering the verbal ability test.On the second day, students studied two 450-word passages and were tested over their content.Findings from one of the studies showed a significant main effect for treatment in favor of questioning-with-training. Further, results from both studies indicate that student generation of questions during study is more effective for lower than for higher verbal ability students.