Can children with learning diabilities benefit from elaborative interrogation?

Students at the Landmark East School participated in two studies designed to examine the effectiveness of elaborative interrogation for improving the recall and comprehension of children with learning disabilities. Students in the first study were instructed to either rehearse (Reading Control) or answer "why" questions (Elaborative Interrogation) about arbitrary pairings of subjects and predicates ("man sentences") and were then given a recall test. Subjects in the elaborative interrogation condition showed significantly greater recall of the sentences than those in the reading control. The second study was designed to test whether elaborative interrogation was effective with paragraph-length materials about animals. For each of two paragraphs subjects either rehearsed or answered "why" questions after each statement in the passage and were then tested for recall and comprehension of the information. The second study also explored the role of prior knowledge in elaborative interrogation by attempting to either activate or not activate prior knowledge about upcoming animals by means of a prereading activity. In terms of recall and comprehension of the animal facts, there were no main effects of either instructional condition or the prereading activity, nor were there any interaction effects. In both studies, individual difference variables were examined in terms of their relationship with recall and comprehension of the material presented. The results of the two studies suggest that elaborative interrogation may be a useful strategy for children with learning disabilities when used with paired associate types of materials. However, further research is required with paragraph-length materials in order to examine issues raised in this study related to differences in the effectiveness of this technique with expository prose versus paired associate tasks.