Affection as a separate dimension of meaningfulness

The meaningfulness of affectively significant (liked) materials has been shown to be separate from traditional explanations of meaningfulness, such as familiarity and rehearsal, in the verbal learning laboratory. The present investigation studied affective meaningfulness in the learning of course materials. Before the course began, students rated summaries of the study units of their course for affection. As predicted, subjects obtained higher examination grades on liked topics than on disliked topics, independently of perhaps the most prominent “rehearsal” explanation, amount of study on the various units. Also as expected, poor students showed a greater reliance on affective meaningfulness in their learning than did good students. Greater awareness of the role of affection in learning is recommended. Present findings suggest that considering this dimension of meaningfulness to be merely a by-product of familiarity or rehearsal may be the most detrimental to the students with the most learning difficulty.     

Using critical questions to evaluate written and oral arguments in an undergraduate general education seminar: a quasi-experimental study

Reading and Writing - Although the Toulmin model (1958) has dominated argumentation research, it does not provide many tools for evaluating argument quality. Towards that end, we draw on work in...