McCrudden, M.T., Schraw, G., Lehman, S., & Poliquin, A. (2007). The effect of causal diagrams on text learning. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 32(3), 367-388.

McCrudden, M.; Schraw, G.; Lehman, S.; Poliquin, A.

2007

McCrudden, M.T., Schraw, G., Lehman, S., & Poliquin, A. (2007). The effect of causal diagrams on text learning. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 32(3), 367-388.

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We examined the effect of studying a causal diagram on comprehension of causal relationships from an expository science text. A causal diagram is a type of visual display that explicitly represents cause-effect relationships. In Experiment 1, readers between conditions did not differ with respect to memory for main ideas, but the readers who studied the causal diagram while reading the text understood better the five causal sequences in the text even when study time was controlled. Participants in Experiment 2 studied only the causal diagram or only the text. There were no differences in memory for main ideas or the causal sequences between these groups. Results indicate that causal diagrams are not merely redundant with text and that causal diagrams affect understanding of causal relationships in the absence of a text. These findings supported the causal explication hypothesis, which states that causal diagrams improve comprehension by explicitly representing the implicit causal structure of the text in a visual format.

Readers between conditions did not differ with respect to memory for main ideas, but the readers who studied the causal diagram while reading the text understood the causal sequences better. More specifically, those who studied the causal diagram tended to show better memory for the longer causal sequences than for the shorter causal sequences. Furthermore, the differences between the two experimental conditions were largest for the two longest causal sequences (i.e., kidney and susceptibility). The longer sequences included more elements of information, which likely required greater use of cognitive resources to establish the causal relationships. Thus, the more complex the sequence, the more the causal diagram aided the reader’s memory.

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