Effects of Elaborative Interrogation on Young Learners' Recall of Facts

Elementary school children and preschoolers were instructed to use an elaboration strategy, elaborative interrogation, which involves responding to "why" questions. The response requires learners to search their own knowledge to try to make novel facts more meaningful. In each of 6 studies, students were presented novel facts that were consistent with the types of facts they might encounter when learning from texts (e. g., facts about animal behaviors, fictional characters, or Canadian provinces). Elementary students (grades 4-8) demonstrated much higher recall for these facts when they were instructed to use elaborative interrogation to generate their own elaborations of facts rather than studying experimenter-provided elaborations or repeating the facts. Preschoolers' (ages 2-6) performance was also higher, although benefits were more modest at this age. The successful implementation of elaborative interrogation was related to learners' knowledge base, so that children with more expansive and developed knowledge bases demonstrated greater learning gains than their less knowledgeable peers. We discuss dependencies among strategies, learning, and knowledge base as critical in determining applications of elaborative interrogation in classrooms.