Selective Attentional Effects of Adjunct Study Questions on Achievement in Nigerian Secondary School Science

Text-book questions remain the most prevalent study aid in helping students selectively attend to critical information contained in science learning materials (Holliday 1981; Okoye 1990; Nworgu 2001 and Eze 2002). (Wickens 1976) reviewed mathemagenic questions (orienting behavioural questions) in his studies and concluded that recent findings suggest that selective attention can account for the results. Questions used in this experiments seemed to focus students' attention upon questioned information. (Rothkopt 1965) hypothesized that an individual is involved in some mathemagenic behaviours (i.e. scanning and inspection behaviours used by a learner in the transformation of nominal stimuli into effective and operational stimuli) when reading textual material. The mathemagenic model predicts that when questions are inserted at the end of textual material, the questions shape and direct the scanning and inspection behaviour of the learner as well as processes and strategies adopted in the search. If the learner finally succeeds in answering the questions inserted at the end of the passage, the strategies and processes used are reinforced and the process is continued. Consequently, increased amount of queried information were retained at the expense of other information resulting in lower non-questioned content achievement. Furthermore, the same selective attention model used to explain these matehmnagenic and other findings also predict that students who are permitted to review learning material and are presented with a population (complete set) of study questions covering only part of the same unit will selectively concentrate on these questioned portions (Anderson 1972; Umeh 2002). Hence focusing learners attention on selected portion containing the critical information results in dysfunctional focusing and incomplete cuing, thus reducing students comprehension to those critical information. An area of growing interest in science education is the relationship between reading and science achievement (Holliday 1979 and 1981; Samuels and Turnure 1974; Thomas 1978; Wooley 1978; Odiase, 1982 and Ajayi 2004). Because one of the most instructional model of acquiring science concepts is through the textbook, a number of science educators have equally considered the relationship between reading ability in science texts and the structure of textual materials (Adrian 1978; Thomas 1978; Klopter 1980; Kaushak 1978; Adejumo 1972; Okoye, 1990 and 1992 and Nworgu 2001). (Adrian 1978) reported a positive relationship between reading achievement and science achievement and between readability of science texts and the structure of the textual materials. Because the readability of a science text is an important factor in science achievement, some investigators (e.g. Thomas 1978; Klopter 1980; Kaushak 1978 and Soyibo 1999), examined whether the readability of texts could be improved by adding pictorial illustrations and diagrams. While (Thomas 1978) concluded that the use of pictures did not aid comprehension, (Klopter 1980) sees that as an over-generalization as the pictorial figures in his study were limited to those that could be made from colour photograph. In his study carried out in Lagos, Nigeria (Adejumo 1972) found that the use of student guide questions to break up verbal learning materials into salient points and intelligent material probing facilitate the retention and recall of such materials when required in a recall test. He also found that accompanying material or verbal learning with teacher guide questions which are constructured on the text to organize the material facilitate the retention and recall of such material when required in a recall test. Finally, he reported that guide questions were instrumental in organizing instructional material as well as facilitating the retention of learned prose. These findings in addition to others cited above coupled with the high premium placed on achievement in science has motivated this study which seeks to assess the place of guide questions on science achievement. …