Premium
RETROACTIVE INTERFERENCE IN MEANINGFUL LEARNING
Author(s) -
HOWE M. J. A.,
COLLEY LORNA
Publication year - 1976
Publication title -
british journal of educational psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.557
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 2044-8279
pISSN - 0007-0998
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8279.1976.tb02982.x
Subject(s) - psychology , interference theory , cued recall , recall , presentation (obstetrics) , cognitive psychology , social psychology , developmental psychology , free recall , cognition , working memory , medicine , radiology , neuroscience
S ummary . It has been suggested that the phenomenon of retroactive interference, by which retention of verbal materials is decreased by the subsequent presentation of similar interpolated items, occurs only in unstructured items, and not in the meaningful and connected information more commonly encountered in educational learning circumstances. An experiment was undertaken to investigate the possibility of retroactive interference occurring in a structured and meaningful prose learning situation. The sample consisted of 18 university students allocated randomly to two groups. The experimental group studied an original prose passage, followed by two very similar interpolated passages. Their final cued recall scores were significantly lower than the scores of a control group, who learned the identical original prose passage, followed by the dissimilar passages.