Underlining Can Make a Difference—Sometimes

Abstract

In a review of the literature on the effectiveness of experimenter-provided and learner-generated underlining, the investigators discovered (i) that few studies, if any, provide clear-cut support for the effectiveness of underlining; (ii) that a limited number of methods of testing recall have been used; (iii) that little is known of how children benefit (or don’t benefit) from underlining; and (iv) that long-term recall has been overlooked. A study is subsequently described in which sixth grade children were presented with experimenter-underlined or normal text, and recall was tested by the cloze procedure. It was found that the underlined words were recalled, both immediately and in the long term (seven days later), significantly better by children who had studied the underlined text, and that this result was not obtained at the expense of other items of information in the text.