Testing the independent effects of refutations and summaries on understanding

ABSTRACT

The present experiment explored the independent effects of refutations and summaries to prevent student misunderstandings when learning from an introductory psychology text on cognitive dissonance. Explicitly presenting and refuting a common misconception about cognitive dissonance did not improve performance on comprehension questions that required understanding of the topic, but adding a final summary paragraph did. The present findings suggest that explanations that aid the integration of correct ideas within a student’s mental model of a phenomenon are more important for supporting conceptual understanding than just the co-activation and recognition of correct and incorrect conceptions.

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank Thomas D. Griffin, Tricia A. Guerrero, and Marta K. Mielicki for discussions on this research, and for developing the materials for the larger project that were used as basis for the present study, as well as Erum Baig, Grace Li, and Aynsley Parker who assisted with developing coding for the student responses. This study began as a research project that fulfilled requirements for the UIC Summer Research Opportunities Program and also as the UIC Honors College Capstone Project for the second author, who was awarded the Sociey for Text & Discourse Undergraduate Research Award for this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data for this experiment is available at https://osf.io/qte3p/. The materials are available upon request from the authors. The experiment was not preregistered.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The research reported here was part of a larger project supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305A160008 to the third author. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education. The first author was supported by a University Fellowship through the UIC Graduate College. The second author was supported by a UIC Summer Research Opportunity Program fellowship.