Elaborative Interrogation: Using "Why" Questions to Enhance the Learning from Text

Author(s): Deborah J. Menke and Michael Pressley

Source: Journal of Reading, Vol. 37, No. 8 (May, 1994), pp. 642-645
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the International Reading Association
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 lit is generally recognized that prior knowl
Deborah J. Menke can affect However,
edge learning. having prior
Michael Pressley knowledge is not enough to increase comprehen
sion and learning?it must also be activated

(Pearson & Spiro, 1982). Many times students fail

to activate and use their prior knowledge sponta
neously, even though information they possess
may make the text more comprehensible and
memorable. This article describes some recent
studies which establish that meaningful learning
can be promoted by a certain type of questioning
activity that leads students to activate prior
knowledge and tie it to the new
information. The technique is
referred to in the literature as
Elaborative elaborative interrogation.

Empirical validation
interrogation: Using The use of questioning to pro
mote learning, both as classroom
and within a text, is a
"why" questions questions
well-established educational

to enhance the practice. There is a large body of

research on the use of question

ing and, indeed, it has proven

from text easy to demonstrate that asking
learning questions affects student acquisi
tion of content (Anderson &
Biddle, 1975;Andre, 1979; Reder,
Memory of facts improved 1985), although questioning
are not
greatly forboth college
effects often large (e.g.,
Hamilton, 1985; Redfield &
students and younger
Rousseau, 1981).
children in recent One possible explanation for the failure of ques

experiments with the tioning manipulations to produce consistently

large effects on learning is that the type of pro
questioning intervention and
cessing encouraged by classroom questioning
described here. in text does not lead to con
adjunct questioning
sistent deep processing of material by students.
For example, in a classroom discussion there is no

guarantee that all students, particularly the more

passive learners, will

attempt to process the ques
tions beyond a surface level. Similarly, the adjunct

questions used in most studies have not required

students to transform the materials or make infer
ences beyond what was provided in the text?

Copyright ?1994
642 JOUmal Of Reading 37:8 1994 International Association
Reading
May

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such questions typically require only recall of par campus. Students in the elaborative interrogation
ticular content. condition were taught that each of the six facts as
The generation of self-questions, however, is a stated could be treated as a why question (e.g.,
questioning manipulation that requires meaning "Why are some of the country's best research insti
ful transformation of the material by the reader, tutes located on or near this campus?"), and they
and it has been employed in a variety of studies attempted to answer the questions as they
with some success (Wong, 1985). Most of the processed the text.
questioning interventions cited by Wong required Students in a reading control condition read and
students to actively analyze text. studied the paragraphs for the same amount of
This article explores another questioning inter time that elaborative interrogation participants
vention that can produce improved learning, pre
processed the passages.
sumably because it promotes active processing of
is a question
materials. Elaborative interrogation Striking results
ing intervention explored by Pressley and his col The elaborative interrogation instruction greatly
leagues as a method for learning material present of the
improved participants' memory passage
ed in factual prose or as factual statements. It is a contents. The results were for four rea
striking
form of "Why?" questioning that encourages stu sons.
dents to take advantage of their prior knowledge 1. The were
learning gains generally large.
or experience in order to make relationships 2. Gains occurred regardless of the quality of
between facts more understandable and memo
response to why questions during study. In fact,
rable.
even when subjects failed to generate answers to

why questions, they were still more likely to

Improved memory the material. It appears
remember that simply
The effects of elaboration have been demonstrat
attempting to answer a why question strengthens
ed in a series of recent experiments (Pressley,
the memory of the fact.
McDaniel, Turnure, Wood, & Ahmad, 1987;
3. Performance in the elaborative interrogation
Pressley, Symons, McDaniel, Snyder, & Turnure,
condition was roughly comparable to performance
1988). For instance, Canadian college students in
when students constructed images representing
Pressley et al.'s (1988) Experiment 3 were asked to
the facts, an elaborative procedure long known to
remember facts about each of the Canadian
the province with the highest be a powerful method of encoding associations
provinces (e.g., per
centage of its population working for the federal that are difficult to learn.
is the Yukon). The most 4. Despite the fact that participants felt that
government important
was that memory of facts was answering why questions was more demanding
finding greatly
improved when students answered questions than just reading the same facts, the elaborative
why
(e.g., "Why would the Yukon be the province with interrogation participants indicated they would
the highest percentage of its people working for continue to use the strategy if they were given
the federal government?"). This approach was another fact-learning task.
termed elaborative interrogation because the

questions required students to generate elabora Benefits for children

tions and these apparently facilitated learning. Wood, Pressley, and Winne (1990) demonstrated
The method works with dense prose. that similar elaborative interrogation benefits can
factually
For example, Woloshyn, Willoughby, Wood, and be obtained with children. They presented stu
Pressley (1990) presented Canadian university stu dents in Grades 4 through 8 with paragraphs con
dents with paragraph-length descriptions of five taining information about animals (e.g., the Grey
Canadian universities, each with six facts about a Seal, Swift Fox, Little Brown Bat). Each paragraph

Elaborative interrogation 643

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contained six pieces of information about an ani In summary, treating to-be-learned facts as why
mal. For example: questions that must be answered as part of study

The grey seal lives with a group of other grey seals. is a powerful method for learning facts presented
Each seal within the group lives on one special spot in prose, as powerful as representational imagery.
or rock. The grey seal likes to live on the Maritime With to generate answers
adults, simply trying to
coast. The grey seal eats fish that are found on the
bottom of the sea. The seal in shallow
why questions improves learning. With children,
grey sleeps
water. The one big danger is the facilitation seems to depend more on generating
for the grey seal
killer whale. good answers, although failing to do so does not
reduce learning below what it would have been
Students in the elaborative interrogation condi otherwise.
tion were taught to respond to each factual state
ment as a why question (e.g., "Why does the seal does elaborative work?
Why interrogation
live with a group of other seals?"). Control partici That stimulating prior knowledge can assist peo
pants spent an equivalent amount of time study ple in organizing and retrieving information is a

ing the material. Again, elaborative interrogation fairly well-established principle of learning
students remembered more of the paragraph facts (Anderson, Reynolds, Schallert, & Goetz, 1977;

(a 0.85 SD advantage for the elaborative interroga Bransford & Johnson, 1972; Pichert & Anderson,
tion learners). 1977). Training students to use elaborative interro

gation is one way to encourage them to activate

their prior knowledge related to a text and thus to
increase their memory for the content.
In studies to date, only one real caveat has

Answering why questions is as

arisen with respect to adult learning. The why
questions must be constructed to orient the learn

good as constructing images to er to prior knowledge that supports the facts they
need to
boost memory for facts, learn?otherwise why questions will not
facilitate learning. For example, in Martin and

providing the questions are Pressley (1991) Canadian students who generated
and answered why questions of the form "Why
well focused. does X happen in province A?" improved their per
formance. But responding to questions of the form

"Why is it surprising that fact X is not true of some

province other than A?" did not help them acquire

the needed information.
As was the case in the adult studies, elaborative
What this last study demonstrated is that even
interrogation subjects remembered as much as
though any question can increase arousal and
students who were taught to study by constructing
effort during learning, why questions work only if
the facts a
images representing (e.g., imagining they stimulate learners to tie together their past
seal sleeping in shallow water, etc.) Unlike the and the new fact.
knowledge
adults, however, children who could answer the We have a description and the empiri
presented
why questions demonstrated better recall than cal verification of elaborative interrogation, or
children who failed to produce responses. In addi to "Why?" questioning, as an effective
responding
tion, correct answers to why questions (answers strategy for learning factual material. The use of
that corresponded to those that biologists provid this strategy may provide students with an addi

ed) produced striking memory advantages, com tional tool in their repertoire of study techniques.

pared to answers that were incorrect. We recommend it as a strategy that may be useful

644 Journal of Reading 37:8 May 1994

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to teachers when are students to Martin, V.L., & Pressley, M. (1991). Elaborative interrogation
they training
effects depend on the nature of the question. ]ournal of
access relevant prior knowledge in situations
EducationalPsychology, 83, 113-119.
where students might not automatically do so. & Spiro, R. The new buzzword in
Pearson, P.D., (1982, May).

reading is schema. Instructor, pp. 46-48.

Pichert, J.W., & Anderson, R.C. (1977). Taking different per

Menke is an instructional assistant with Montgomery spectives on a story. ]ournalof Educational Psychology, 69, 309
County Public Schools inMaryland and a doctoralcandi
315.

Pressley, M., McDaniel, M.A., Turnure, I.E., Wood, E., &

date at theUniversity ofMaryland (Reading Center?
Ahmad, M. (1987). Generation and precision of elaboration:
2311 Benjamin Building, University ofMaryland, College Effects on intentional and incidental learning, journal of
Park MD 20742-1175, USA). Pressley now teaches in the Experimental Psychology-. Learning, Memory and Cognition, 13,
291-300.
Departmentof EducationalPsychologyand Statistics at the
Pressley, M.; Symons, S., McDaniel, M.A., Snyder, B.L., &
State UniversityofNew YorkatAlbany.
Turnure, I.E. (1988). Elaborative interrogation facilitates
acquisition of confusing facts, journal of Educational
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Andre, T. (1979). Does answering higher-level questions while Woloshyn, V.E., Willoughby, J.T., Wood, I.E., & Pressley, M.

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Helping students use electronic searches and abstracts

One of the problems with the use of abstracts and title listings [for academic research) is that often their
content does not accurately reflect what is in the article. Thus articles that relate to one's search are
missed. Students inmy classes often tell me there is nothing in the data banks in the library that relates
to the topic I've assigned or they've chosen. When I ask them to tell me the descriptors they've used to
probe the data banks, they look at me blankly but then realize that perhaps they have had only a small
number of descriptors and, further, the descriptors are too narrow in scope. After a few moments of dis
cussion, the students realize there are a host of key words they could use to search the data banks to find
what they are looking for and, almost always, they find more than they can use.
From "The Case for Journal Abstracts," by Robert V. Schnucker, Scholarly Publishing, October 1993, p. 59.

Elaborative interrogation 645

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