Children's Processing of Prose: Memory Facilitation by Expectation and Uncertainty in Text. Technical Report No. 259.

This experiment investigated the assumption that children's learning and retention of prose material can be differentially affected by varying discrepancy from expectation (as established by an advance organizer). It was hypothesized that a passage which differed significantly from expectation would produce heightened arousal, which should in turn facilitate long- and short-term retention as measured by fact-inference comprehension measures. Furthermore, intermediate levels of discrepancy should produce better learning and retention than either the control or the completely discrepant extremes. From the data obtained, it was found that there was no significant effect on comprehension and retention due to passage condition. The retention interval effect indicated that forgetting took place. There was also a significant interaction between comprehension type (literal versus inferential) and retention, suggesting that the learning characterized by one type of question was retained to a greater extent than that characterized by the other, or that probably the original learning of material relevant to one question type was greater than that for the other type. (Author/SW)