Learning About Posterior Probability: Do Diagrams and Elaborative Interrogation Help?

To learn from a text, students must make meaningful connections among related ideas in that text. This study examined the effectiveness of two methods of improving connections—elaborative interrogation and diagrams—in written lessons about posterior probability. Undergraduate students (N = 198) read a lesson in one of three questioning conditions (read twice, embedded questioning, and elaborative interrogation) and one of three diagram conditions (text only, diagram without redundant text, and diagram with redundant text). Elaborative interrogation negatively affected learning from the lesson, relative to reading the lesson twice. One possible explanation for this finding is that the quality of answers to the elaborative interrogations was poor. When the lesson was read twice, diagrams helped learning from the lesson relative to text only. Implications of these findings for instruction in probabilistic reasoning are discussed.