Effect of Depth of Information Processing on Students’ Ability to Acquire and Retrieve Information Related to Different Instructional Objectives

Abstract

The purpose of this exploratory investigation was to evaluate the effects that variations in depth of information processing have on students’ memory systems in terms of their ability to acquire and retrieve information related to different types of instructional objectives. In addition, the study examined the effect of visual/verbal testing of visualized instruction. Two hundred undergraduate students were randomly assigned to treatment groups, and received their respective instructional presentation and either visual or verbal test formats of the five criterion measures. Results indicated that all levels of depth of information processing are not equally effective in facilitating student achievement of different instructional objectives. Findings also support the contention that although information acquisition may be facilitated by the use of visualization, information is converted from the visual format to the verbal format for storage and retrieval purposes and is subsequently most readily retrievable in the verbal mode.