DOI: 10.5255/ukda-sn-856609
title: Self-referencing in the Classroom, 2020-2023

description: This data collection comprises seven experimental studies that assesses the effects of self-referential cues (e.g., the personal pronoun ‘you’) on children’s learning and processing. There are three experiments focused on numeracy processing in word problems, three experiments looking at literacy processing in close reading tasks, and a final experiment exploring the learning of new information. In the numeracy experiments, we presented 7- to 11-year-old children with arithmetic word problems (e.g., “Eve has 5 apples. Jane has 2 apples more than Eve. How many marbles does Eve have?”), half of which replaced one character name with the self-referent pronoun ‘you’. In the first two experiments, we found that when problems included the self-referent pronoun, they tended to elicit faster and more accurate responses from children. Further, these effects were most pronounced in difficult conditions (e.g., in subtraction rather than addition problems, and when wording is inconsistent rather than consistent with the operation required). We followed up these behavioural experiments with an eye-tracking study, monitoring the length of time that gaze was fixated on specific words within the mathematical word problems. Fixation times showed that children spent significantly less time looking at self-referent pronouns than those referring to another person. This suggests that the effects of self-referent pronouns arise because self-cues facilitate the processing of relevant information, reducing working memory load in problem-solving. In the literacy studies, we tested the effects of self-pronouns on text processing in 9- to 11-year-old children, in the context of close reading tasks. Across three experiments, we trialled different types of passages and questions, different numbers of characters, and different positions of the self-pronoun, as well as presenting questions with the close reading text present or absent onscreen. Findings were mixed, with some initial evidence that self-pronouns improved children’s engagement, especially when positioned first. However, these effects have not been found consistently across experiments and conditions, suggesting that self-cues are not a reliable method of enhancing performance on close reading literacy tasks. Finally, in our learning study we tested the effects of three encoding conditions on 9- to 11-year-old children’s ability to remember new second language vocabulary (Japanese kanji for common nouns). Participants practised the kanji by drawing them with another person, drawing them with themselves, or including them in a drawing of a relevant autobiographical memory. Participants’ memory for the kanji did not differ significantly across conditions. They then watched either a video conveying the educational value of self-referencing or a control video, before learning more kanji. Free recall data revealed an interaction, with the self-referencing video producing an advantage only for those previously asked to draw themselves without an autobiographical cue. These findings suggest that while self-referencing was not effective at enhancing learning, it has the potential to support memory when scaffolded. Together, these experiments suggest that including self-referent cues has mixed effects in educational contexts. For tasks that have a high working memory load such as numerical problem solving, self-cues can be very effective at enhancing task performance, reducing the processing demands of relevant information. However, for longer forms of processing such as close reading and learning tasks, self-referential cues and strategies did not reliably enhance performance above other techniques without scaffolding. This suggests that self-referencing cues should be applied in education, but only within specific contexts in which they can be used to ease the working memory load of difficult tasks.