What are "facilitative questions"? The word facilitative means to make easy, smooth the progress of, help, aid, assist. The term, Facilitative Questions, was introduced by researcher E.Z. Rothkopf in the early 1960s. Facilitative questions, he postulated, are questions designed to aid or assist the processing and assimilation (what psychologists call encoding) of information. Many experiments have been conducted showing that questions serve to assist a subject in learning new information, and retaining that information over time. Depending upon the types of questions presented, learning can be either ephemeral or permanent. The types of questions might be verbatim, rote memorization of information, or higher-level, interpretative types of questions. Both have been shown to be facilitative; however, the rote questions are facilitative mostly for superficial information, while the deeper-level, interpretative type questions are facilitative for longer-term, interpretive information. And longer-term, interpretive learning is the type most useful to grappling with life's various challenges.The following is a paper I wrote while studying Theories of Learning.
THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF ADJUNCT QUESTIONS ON LEARNING
Does testing serve to reinforce learning?
It frequently happens that students forget most of what they have learned during the semester very shortly after the final examination. Thorndike and Hagen (1969) have shown that fully 90 percent to 95 percent of teacher-prepared tests require only rote recall of information, and do not test the student's comprehension of the course material. It has been argued that the effects of rote learning are, at best, of minimal interest to educational research, while presumably, the ultimate education goal is to foster higher cognitive skills, which would facilitate a person's ability to apply rules and principles to future problems and issues.
Research using adjunct questions to examine the effects of question level can be generally divided into two classes: studies employing posttests that ask only for factual or verbatim recall of formation rom a given text, and studies employing posttests that ask higher-level, application-type questions from the text. Verbatim questions induce subjects to mechanically memorize the individual words n the text, rather than encode the passage meaningfully, while higher-level questions induce encoding of unified structures of ideas. Questions which require comprehension of the text have been shown to produce better learning and remembering than questions which can be answered purely on the basis of surface features.
The studies reported in this essay were conducted with adjunct questions of various levels, appearing at various positions and intervals within written texts, in experiments carried out primarily with adult subjects. Interestingly, most of these studies were designed to evaluate the facilitative effects of adjunct questions upon subjects' performance on posttests given either immediately or shortly after a training session. The available data on longitudinal studies in this area are slim.
The insertion of questions within prose material has been shown to facilitate learning from text materials (Rothkopf, 1966). Depending upon question level, position of questions within the text and question frequency, the effect has been shown to be both direct and indirect, facilitating learning of both factual and inferential information, as measured by subjects' performance on posttests of questions identical to those presented during learning, as well as on questions about new material from the text. The facilitative effect has been shown to be markedly higher with questions that appear after a learning segment.
Anderson (1972) has shown that encoding is achieved on at least two levels: phonological, or verbatim, and semantic, or meaningful. He postulated that adjunct question placement within a text may result in differences in encoding, where questions placed before a text segment would direct a student to focus his or her attention on verbatim, target information sought by those questions, whereas questions placed after a text segment may prompt the student to encode the previous information more meaningfully.
Rothkopf (1965) tested the effect of question placement within a text upon learning from written instructional material. He found that when adjunct questions were placed after a passage, the effect as both specific and general, but if such questions were placed before a passage, the only facilitative effect was question specific [in other words, the student would be scanning the learning material or information that fit the question posed prior to the segment, and would focus his or her attention on that information, almost to the exclusion of other information]. It has been repeatedly shown that test-like events, such as adjunct questions, improve performance on subsequent criterion tests. This study gives strong support to suggest that when subjects study written material, they not only learn the specific content of the text, but may also acquire some general skills, suggesting further that they very act of answering adjunct questions can be instructive. [make this clearer with supportive evidence. How does retrieving information cement it in our brains?].
Rothkopf (1966) hypothesized that postquestions serve as reinforcing or discriminative stimuli. A postquestion may serve as a review and synthesis of material just read (reinforcing stimulus), or it may provide a "hint" as to what sort of information the reader is to look for in subsequent paragraphs (discriminating stimulus). Rothkopf has found that questions elicit a general class of responses, which he called "mathemagenic behaviors," to describe activities which influence learning from prose. Rothkopf's paradigm consisted of interspersing relevant questions in a passage of text, and when testing their facilitative effects upon subsequent criterion tests. Typically, either one or two questions would be inserted before or after a passage of certain length, the question type varying from low-level, rote recall of information, to high-level, comprehension type questions. Questions and texts would appear on separate sheets of paper, and the subject would not be allowed to turn back to the text, nor to take notes while reading.
Following the completion of the reading and question answering, a posttest would be administered on the amount of direct and indirect information retained from the entire text read. Typically, the findings show that the adjunct question group of subjects retained more direct and indirect information than a no-questions, reading-only group. This has been shown to be especially true with long-term retention.
Rothkopf and Bisbicos (1967) studied the effects of using specific categories of questions in structural material to see if they facilitated learning of specific content of the target text. They distributed to the subjects experimental materials consisting of text and written instructional material. Subjects worked at their own pace, but were required to record the time it took for each of them to complete their part of the reading. The criterion test was administered immediately following training. The researchers found that subjects performed better on the criterion tests if given questions after exposure to the relevant text segment than if such questions were presented before inspection of a relevant text segment. Additionally, they found that performance on criterion tests was better if the question types on the tests were similar to the ones presented during training. This experiment demonstrated that test-like events, such as adjunct questions of any type, can facilitate learning, especially if placed following a text segment. This research supports the so-called Socratic method of teaching at various universities.
Frase (1967) built upon Rothkopf's studies by varying the adjunct question placement within the text, the length of the passage to be learned, and knowledge of results of the adjunct questions. He found that if adjunct questions were placed before a passage, they facilitated factual learning, but had a deleterious effect upon inferential learning since they tended to limit and focus the subjects' attention directly on the sought-for information to the practical exclusion of other information. However, when the questions were placed following a passage, both specific and incidental learning was improved. Scores on incidental questions tended to improve with longer text segments, indicating that inferential learning was facilitated when the text was presented as a cohesive whole. Knowledge of results of adjunct questions had no significant effect upon posttest performance. His study supports Rothkopf's (1966) experiments showing that adjunct questions facilitate learning of both specific and incidental information, especially if placed following a text segment.
In another study, Frase (1971) found that deep, semantic postquestions had a facilitative effect upon the recall of both factual and inferential information, regardless of their position within the text, presumably because inferential questions subsume factual material.
Felker and Dapra (1975) combined Rothkopf's (1966) mathemagenic behaviors theory with Anderson's (1972) distinction between verbatim and comprehension level questions, to study the effect of adjunct question position upon problem-solving ability, defined as the ability to appropriately apply rules and principles to new problem situations, and use previously learned concepts in some combination to achieve desired goals (Gagne, 1964, 1970). Their findings were consistent with previous work done in this area, that high-level, comprehension type adjunct postquestions provided the best method of enhancing mathemagenic behaviors, especially with regard to problem-solving ability.
Rickards and DiVesta (1974) compared the effects of two types of questions: rote, verbatim questions, and meaningful, higher-order questions. Their research has shown that with verbatim questions, material is learned in a small random and disorganized fashion. Such learning is not deeply encoded, but is merely mechanically memorized directly from text. The subject is not required to process the material in a manner designed to engrain it into memory, apply or even understand the material. On the other hand, meaningful learning requires a certain organization of concepts, categorization of facts and coordination of higher-order related ideas. Rickards and DiVesta found that adjunct questions in general, and higher-order questions in particular, especially when placed frequently within a text, produced significantly better recall of both related and incidental information than reading only, a result at variance with Frase's (1967) findings that scores improved with greater question distance from the text. Interestingly, they found evidence to suggest that even rote questions of concepts yielded better results than rote questions of facts or irrelevant questions, regardless of how frequently placed.
McGaw and Grotelueschen (1972) examined the direction of effect of adjunct questions, and found that both forward, shaping behaviors, as well as backward, review behaviors occurred with inserted questions. They found that inserted questions provide a shaping, expectant effect on both direct and indirect material, especially with subjects of lower ability. Their examination of the effect of inserted question distance from the text revealed that their effect was attenuated on both direct and indirect learning with increased distance from the text.
Duell (1974) studied the effect of providing behavioral objectives during studying as possible facilitators of learning. She found that behavioral objectives improved learning, but only if such objectives directed the students to concentrate on areas they would not normally consider as important. With students not provided behavioral objectives, no significant difference was observed on application items, which were presumably considered important and likely to be on the test. What this may mean is that if a group of subjects were reading a segment of text from a driver's license book, the behavioral objectives might be to extrapolate driving rules in one's state to driving rules in a foreign country. Such behavioral objectives, if presented before studying the text, might steer the students to focus on inferential information, in addition to rote, verbatim recall of facts and figures. And that has been shown to be improved when behavioral objects were provided, as opposed to no such objectives being given.
Wilhite (1983) compared the effects of prepassage questions, both low and high level, upon students' memory of both direct and indirect information. He found that recall of indirect information was greater when the adjunct question was a high-level one than either the low-level question or no-question conditions. Low-level questions proved more facilitative for recall of superordinate information than no-question conditions. Indirect recall was higher for passage segments containing information relevant to high-level questions than for segments containing information relevant to low-level questions. He also found a correlation between facilitative effects of adjunct questions and vocabulary level of subjects, indicating that the greater the verbal ability of the subject, the less likely that processing aids would prove facilitative. This reduced effect may reflect a higher-ability student's own capacity for spontaneously processing information, whereas the low-ability subject may benefit from instructional directions, such as the attention-focusing effects of prepassage questions.
E.Z. Rothkopf, http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/edu/63/2/87/
See, also, http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/edu/63/2/87/
