An active role in learning was assumed by the 80 volunteers in this experiment. Three independent variables were manipulated, knowledge of a recognition test, voicing an opinion about the passage, and the difficulty of passage. Three factorial analyses of variance showed significant main effects for knowledge of a recognition test and difficulty of passage on the nonsemantic section of the recognition task; significant three-way interactions of knowledge of the recognition task and voicing of an opinion and difficulty of the passage on the combined questions and on the semantic questions. The results fall within the depth of processing framework of Craik and Lockhart (1972).
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