THE EFFECT OF A CATEGORIZATION STRATEGY ON SECONDARY STUDENTS’ RETENTION OF LITERARY VOCABULARY

Developing category labels that subsume subordinate concepts ought to increase longterm retention and retrieval of information. The present study introduced one group of high school students to a categorization strategy for vocabulary terms related to literary analysis. These students displayed significantly better retention of literary terminology than a control group. The results of this study suggest that categorization is a worthwhile addition to the traditional Socratic approach to literary analysis.