Impact of Prior Knowledge on Comprehension and Recall

Lab Report: Impact of Prior Knowledge on Comprehension and Recall
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Introduction
This lab report describes an in-class experiment that was done to find out how context and prior knowledge affected how well students understood and remembered written passages. The basis of this experiment is Bransford and Johnson's (1972) article titled "Impact of Context on Comprehension and Recall." A similar study design was applied in an effort to obtain similar results. Participants read and remembered passages with or without context.
Methods
Participants
This experiment had 30 total participants from a psychology class (10 males, 20 females). Each participant had a strong command of written and spoken English and had no contact with the study's materials prior to this experiment. The participants were randomly split into two equal groups of 15.
Materials
The materials for this experiment consisted of two paragraphs, labeled as Paragraph 1 and Paragraph 2. Both paragraphs were designed to be similar in structure and content, with the primary distinction being the presence or absence of context. The experiment employed a between-subjects design, with Group 1 receiving Paragraph 1 with context and Group 2 receiving Paragraph 2 without context.
Procedure
1 The 30 participants were randomly grouped into Group 1 as well as Group 2.
2 Group 1 received Paragraph 1, which included context, before reading the passage. The context provided was related to the content of the passage.
3 Group 2 received Paragraph 2, which contained no contextual information.
4 All participants had five minutes to complete a comprehension rating assignment after reading the assigned text. On a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 denoting low comprehension and 7 denoting perfect comprehension, they graded how well they understood the material.
5 Later, participants had five minutes to retain as much information as they could from the paragraph. Their responses were recorded for analysis.
Data Analysis
SPSS was used to analyze the experiment's data. An independent sample t-test was done to find out how context affected memory and understanding. The context was the independent variable (Group 1 had context, Group 2 did not), and the dependent variables were recall rates and understanding ratings.
Group

Comprehension Rating

Recall Score

1

6

12

1

5

9

1

7

15

1

6

11

1

5

10

2

3

6

2

4

8

2

2

...