Elaboration strategies and individual differences in academic achievement among adolescent learners

This study investigated the relative potency of four memory strategies for learning factual information. To examine the efficacy of the strategies in relation to academic ability, students were classified as low or average achievers based on their performance on a verbal skills measure. Tenth to twelfth grade students (62 females and 48 males) were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions: Elaborative Interrogation (BI, a why questioning strategy), Repetition of Provided Elaborations (PE), Repetition Control (RC), and Judgement/Analysis (J/A, where students evaluated provided elaborations and justified their judgement). Performance in the BI condition was greater than that in the Rd condition for the average achievers. There were no differences across conditions within the low achievement group, within the BI condition, average achievers performed better than low achievers-- an expected finding since low achievers have less relevant knowledge to access when generating elaborations. Neither achievement group benefitted from provision of elaborations (PB) even when the task entailed extensive processing as in the J/A condition