FREE ESSAY ON RESULT, METHODS, AND INTRO

RESULT, METHODS, AND INTRO

12/8/00
Introduction, Methods, and Results
Memory Recall
Adianice Correa
Memory Recall
There are many questions to how people process information. Many have understood that
people remember and learn components of a passage more easily when particular elements of
the passage are subjectively considered to be important than when it's not. Systems such
as story schemata produce organized descriptions of the substance of a text. Thus,
drawing attention to particular parts of a story. However, there is no definite answer as
to what makes such element s important, and therefore making such components become
easily retrieved. 
This paper will list possible explanations for what makes specific text important.
Findings from prior research give special consideration to evidence that seem to maintain
dissimilarities between encoding and retrieval. The schemata theory has been used for the
present experiment. In this theory, components of a schemata are slots or variables which
may be defined as events or elements that are remembered better because there is a
structure or framework laid down beforehand. Such theories, which try to explain how
schemas work are recognized as the "attention-directing theory" or the "slot theory."
Schema theory provides an instant annotation on the dominance in the recollection of
important information.
In the "attention-directing" hypothesis the schema singles out important elements.
Therefore, more attention is devoted to these elements than to less important ones, and
so they more likely to be learned. Another hypothesis is the "ideational scaffolding"
hypothesis in which the schema is most likely going to contain a slot for important text
elements where the information gets stored specifically because there is a function for
it. Ways of processing information are based upon individual differences, in which there
may or may not be slots for both important and unimportant elements.
Several investigators (Bower, 1977; Mandler & Johnson, 1977; Pichert & Anderson, 1977)
have contemplated that a schema might provide a retrieval arrangement. The idea is that
memory search comes from the generic knowledge integrated in the schema to the particular
information stored when the text was read. A second possibility is that schemata guide
"output editing." This would require suggesting that a schema includes within itself an
indicator of significance, which in conjunction with the demand characteristics of the
recall causes the person to establish a response condition. A final possible retrieval
process is "inferential reconstruction" (Spiro, 1977). Suppose that a participant was
attempting to recall a story about going to a movie theatre. He or she might not remember
whether popcorn had been eaten, but since there is a slot in his or her schema for
popcorn being eaten during movie- watching. And so, the popcorn may be reconstructed, and
assumes that soda was a most likely beverage to be drunk during the move session, being
produced as a plausible guess. Therefore, the abstract apparatus of the schema will be
biased toward reconstructing important elements. 
There is a repeated finding that important elements persist to emerge in recall code of
behavior after a retention period, whereas the appearance of unimportant elements
decreases overwhelmingly (cf. Bower, 1976; Newman, 1939). In the present study, college
students were read stories from either of two directed perspectives or from no directed
perspective. The passage had to do with a subject named Spike, who was trying to get out
of a situation, being bound and had been accused of doing something wrong. The situation
was described to be in a closed tight space with a confinement description of his
surroundings. Different groups rated the importance of the elements in the story from
three points of view: the viewpoint of wrestler, the viewpoint of a convict, or a non-
directional perspective. 
The purpose of the experiment described in this paper was to attempt to offer a
foundation for the process in text recall of retrieval methods separate from storage
mechanisms. Within a schema framework, it can be argued that people may store information
when reading a text, which they fail to produce when recalling that same information. 
After the subjects had been read the Spike passage, all attempted to recall the story
after being presented with a distraction test. One third of the subjects were directed to
one perspective, that is, from wrestler, to convict, to a not title perspective. The
importance of having two different perspectives (wrestler, and convict) and one
non-perspective variable (no title) is that if these subjects were to recall information
related to the perspectives directed to them then there is evidence of differences for
retrieval processes.
Method
Participants
The experimenter chose 24 subjects by using an intact group selection. The experimenter
entered an educational psychology class that was already there (intact). Random
assignment of the students to the three independent levels (wrestler, convict, and no
title) was used. This is a between- subjects design.
Apparatus
The subjects were assigned to a group using a table of random numbers. Scraps of paper
were given to the subjects in order to record their last names. Their information was
then drawn from a pile one by one, and later tabulated in order to make a random
assignment. 
Procedure
The experimenter verbally presented the subjects with an ambiguous passage. The vague
story was used in order to set up the test for the hypothesis; therefore one can see the
effect of the schema coming true. In this case, one may expect that having a title, or
not title has a chance of affectingly bias the individuals' perspective of the story. The
experimental passage was a narrative about a subject named Spike who seemed to have been
confined and punished for something he had done earlier. The passage contained a number
of points of interest to a wrestler, a convict, as well as any other prospect (no title).
After the passage had been read, a distraction task had been administered. This task is a
version of the Brown Hyphen Peterson task. The subjects were asked to count 3 to 4 digit
numbers backwards by 3's for three different numbers.
The subjects were then told to write their responses on sheets of paper. They were
encouraged to write down anything in any order, with as much detail as remembered. The
following instructions were read to them; "Please write down as much of the exact story
as you can on these two sheets of paper. If you cannot remember the exact words of any
sentence, but you do remember the meaning, write down a sentence or part of a sentence as
close to the original as possible. It is extremely important that you write down every
bit of the story which you can remember." The subjects had three minutes to write their
responses down.
The paragraph had been divided into 16 idea units, and to make sure that scoring was
accurate; one point was given to each idea unit. The subjects' responses were scored
based on the presence or absence of idea units. The participants played an active role in
scoring their own protocol.
Results
In the process of tabulation, a mean was calculated for the three independent variables
(Wrestler, Convict, and No title). Descriptive statistics were performed to compare the
means of the three variables. Coding was used to distinguish these variables as shown; 1
= wrestler, 2 = convict, 3 = no title. The means for wrestler, convict, and no title
variables show that the presence of both title and no title increased recall (Figure 1).
According to the calculated standard deviations of the three variables, variable 1 shows
almost no variability with a range of 2- 7, variable 2 shows moderate variability with a
range of 1- 12, and variable 3 shows almost no variability with a range of 2- 5 (Figure
1). 
The ANOVA of all the data was then recovered showing that F (2, 21) = 2.75, p * .05 where
p = .086 (Figure 2). This shows that the results are not significant where the
probability of making a type 1 error is 8.6 % or p * .15. The results of the Post Hoc t
-tests indicate that the difference between the mean of variable 1 (wrestler) and
variable 2 (wrestler) is 1.5. The difference between the mean of variable 2 (convict) and
variable 3 (no title) is 2.5 and the difference between the mean of variable 1 and
variable 3 is 1.0 (Figure 3). According to the graph of Effect of Title on Recall
variable 2 has the highest recall rate, variable 1 has the second highest recall rate,
and variable 3 has the lowest recall rate (Figure 4).