A Critical Review of Mathemagenic Behaviors and the Effect of Questions upon the Retention of Prose Materials 1

Abstract

The recent research on the effect of questions upon the retention of prose materials was critically reviewed with respect to four important determining variables—material difficulty, individual ability, learning time, and learning strategy. A detailed analysis of the literature suggested the following: (a) a failure to adequately control for the learning time and strategy variables has rendered the recent research ungeneralizable to important theoretical and applied situations, and (b) the concept of mathemagenic behavior is a barbarism that contributes more to confusion of thinking than to clarity of thinking. It was concluded that behavior should be relegated to a secondary role in future research on learning from prose, and that the investigation of learning strategies should be elevated to a primary role.