The purpose of this study was concerned to investigate the relationship between the organizational levels of interpolated learning material and the effect of retroaction. Organizational level was operationally defined as the degree of manifestation of the meaningfulness expressed by a sentence constructed by 16 Chinese characters employed in this study.
40 college students, 22 males and 18 females, participated as subjects. On the basis of their scores of Chinese obtained in the previous semester they were divided into 4 groups with each group of 10 subjects.
The material, learned was a list of 16 Chinese characters. They were organized ui the following three different levels:
Non-organization: A. No logical relations among the.16 characters, they were merely randomly arranged.
B. An another random arrangement of these characters.
Low-organization: Although some of the characters were formed as phrases, they did not express a complete thought.
High-organization: A meaningful sentence was made by the 16 characters, each of them had logical relations with the others.
The following learning orders were randomly assigned to the 4 groups:
Original learning Interpolated learning Relearning
Group A Non-organization A rest Non-organization A
Group B Non-organization A Non-oranization B Non-organization A
Group C Non-organization A Low-organization Non-organization A
Group D Non-organization A High-organization Non-organization A
Each organization was presented character by an automatic timecontrolled projector. The anticipation method was used as a learning procedure.. The number of trials required for each subject who reached the point of the first errorless anticipation was used as a learning criterion. The saving (relearning) method was used for testing retention.
The results are summarized as follows:
1. In the original learning no significant differences among the means of the 4 groups were found. This indicated that these groups, while learning the same non-organized material, tended to be equal in learning abilities. 2. The results of final analysis of variance of relearning indicated that the differences among group means were significantly greater than the individual differences within groups (F=4.03, p＜.05). This difference obviously related to the degrees of organizational level of the interpolated learning, the higher the organization the lesser the number of trials required for relearning. This indicated a tendency for retroactive inhibition to decrease as the level of organization of the interpolated learning was increased.
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The Relationship between the Organizational Levels of Interpolated Learning Material and the Effect of Retroaction
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