Summary of Contextual Prerequisites for Understanding: Some Investigations of Comprehension and Recall

        The researcher was expected to find that prior knowledge helps plays an important role in understanding the meaning of passages and comprehension. A passage couldn’t be simplified without prior experience and information in the same field of comprehension. In understanding the linguistic information, it was expected that past information in the same direction is necessary as meanings will be simplified that way. In the article, researcher was actually expected to demonstrate that Ss have a better understanding of the passage with a prior knowledge of the same passage.

        In the article, the experiment or method consisted actually a phase of acquisition followed by recall and comprehension rating, namely two tasks. In the experiment, there were 5 independent groups or communities consisting of ten Ss in each group. There were three other experiments similar to the first one and the rating scale was similar as well. There were two contexts, No Context consisted of Ss who didn’t have a prior knowledge while the Context Before included Ss who saw the proper picture of context before hearing the lines or passage. There were other three groups as well. In the experiment, the contextual perquisites behaved as an independent variable while Recall and Comprehension acted as a dependent variable. Subjects of one group were given some prior information and told to recall the passage after hearing while the other group’s subjects were not given any prior information and were told to do the same.

        The results of the experiment were actually analyzed using Dunnett’s test and it was found that Ss who were given some prior information were able to recall better and they had more ideas compared to the ones who were simply asked to hear the passage and recall strongly. With the absence of prior context, the recall and comprehension ratings were low and it suggested that prior context helped in storing semantics.

    In the article, it has been found that when it comes to processing data or information, contexts are important. Through all four experiments, it was analyzed that group of Ss with knowledge prior to the activity performed better in recalling.

    What I liked about the article was the fact that only a single experiment was not conducted and there were diverse experiments giving accurate results about recalling power with context  [1].

References of Contextual Prerequisites for Understanding: Some Investigations of Comprehension and Recall