Hierarchical Importance of Pre-Passage Questions: Effects on Cued Recall

This experiment compared the effects of pre-passage questions that quizzed information of different structural importance on college students' cued recall of expository prose passages. Among higher-vocabulary subjects, cued recall of detail information not specifically quizzed by the pre-passage questions was significantly greater in the condition in which pre-passage questions quizzed a detail unit than in the higher-level pre-passage question condition or the no pre-passage question condition, p < .05. These findings suggest that lower-level pre-passage questions do facilitate encoding of related details for subjects of certain ability levels, and that earlier findings showing a facilitation of free recall by higher-level pre-passage questions, but not by lower-level pre-passage questions, reflect primarily a retrieval phenomenon. However, the results also indicate that lower-level pre-passage questions are specific in their facilitative effects and do not promote memory for related main ideas.