Anderson & Biddle - 1975 - On Asking People Questions about What They are Reading

referenceArchiveUUID: "0a9f609e-6fd6-405a-96f2-468b45ca6718"
fullTitle: "On Asking People Questions about What They are Reading"
authors: ["Richard C. Anderson","W. Barry Biddle"]

The authors review the effects of inserting “adjunct questions” into the reading experience (i.e. Adjunct questions improve comprehension of related but untested content): under what conditions is performance improved? What might be the mechanism?

Conditions under which adjunct questions are found to help:

  • Repeated vs. new post-test items: Repeated post-test questions get a bigger boost than new questions (no surprise)
  • Position: Asking questions after each section seems consistently better than before
  • Timing: The closer to the material it’s about, the better, it seems (How often and where should mnemonic medium review areas be inserted?)
  • Response mode: The impact on short answer questions seems to be greater than the impact on multiple choice questions.
  • Feedback: Providing feedback usually (but not always) produces better results on new items.
  • Overt vs. covert response: Overt responses seem to produce more facilitation.
  • Motivation: There’s some light evidence that effect may diminish or disappear with motivation.
  • Nature of the adjunct questions: “comprehension”-style questions seem to produce bigger effects than “verbatim” questions (though this paper found the opposite in its experiments)
  • Questions vs. review statements: questions perform better than mere statements expressing the most important things to remember (related: Mnemonic medium prompts signal what the author finds important)
  • Relevancy: the effect is only produced when the questions are relevant to the text

The author tries valiantly to experimentally validate a hypothesis that adjunct questions increase depth of processing, but they broadly fail.