ABSTRACT
The qualitative difference is great between strategies that students report using and those that the "experts" advocate using. Research on adjunct questions investigates the effects on learning when people are asked questions about what they are reading. The direct effect of the adjunct questions occurs when the performance of students on criterion questions identical to those used in the adjunct form is superior to performance of students in a read-only condition. When the adjunct questions are higher level questions, that is, they require the student to go beyond a surface meaning of the text in order to answer the question, they have significant direct and indirect effects. Early experimental work has shown that isolating an item to be learned against a crowded or homogeneous background facilitates the learning of that item. Instructional objectives are statements about the nature of the criterion task and the scope of the content to be learned while studying text.
