Effects of Elaborations Included in Textbooks: Large Time Cost, Reduced Attention, and Lower Memory for Main Ideas
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Effects of Elaborations Included in Textbooks: Large Time Cost, Reduced Attention, and Lower Memory for Main Ideas Nola Daley 1
& Katherine A. Rawson
1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
Textbooks currently include many elaborations that describe, illustrate, and explain main ideas, increasing the length of these textbook chapters. The current study investigated if the cost in additional reading time that these elaborations impose is outweighed by benefits to memory for main ideas. Given that elaborations in textbooks sometimes fail to produce memory benefits, the current study also investigated if the reason is that less time is spent reading main ideas sentences in elaborated versus unelaborated texts. In two experiments, participants read a textbook passage with just the main ideas or with these main ideas and elaborations. Two days later, participants completed tests of their memory for the main ideas. Conceptually replicating previous research, elaborations did not provide a memory benefit commensurate with the time cost they imposed. Results also indicated that the lack of benefit is at least partially attributable to less time spent reading main ideas for the elaborated versus unelaborated text. To further investigate why students spent less time on main idea sentences, Experiment 2 provided evidence that this difference may be due to difficulty discriminating main ideas from elaborations while reading. In sum, textbook elaborations may impair memory for main ideas due to less time spent on these main ideas despite the large overall time cost imposed; thus elaborated texts can be less effective than unelaborated texts. Keywords Elaborations . Expository text . Memory . Student learning . Main ideas Textbook chapters are typically lengthy. Only a small proportion of chapter content includes main ideas, which are presumably the targets of learning. In contrast, a large proportion of Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-02009553-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Nola Daley [email protected]
1
Department of Psychological Sciences, Kent State University, P.O. Box 5190, Kent, OH 44242-0001, USA
Educational Psychology Review
chapter content includes elaborations. Elaborations included in textbooks involve details that are meant to describe, illustrate, or explain main ideas. Including these elaborations necessarily increases text length, and longer texts will presumably require more time for students to read. Given that students have limited time to devote to learning, an interesting and important question arises: Do students benefit from spending some of this time reading the elaborations included in textbooks (for brevity hereafter we refer to elaborations that are included in textbooks as textbook elaborations)? Prior research fails to address this question definitively. Therefore, the current study further investigated the costs and benefits of textbook
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