Studying narrative text: The effects of annotating vs. journal writing on test performance

Abstract

Abstract While making marginal notations in text is considered an effective test preparation strategy, its effect is rarely studied. Further, few studies have dealt with annotations for narrative text. One purpose of this study was to measure the effects of training students to make annotations vs. training them in a commonly used strategy for narratives, journal writing, as preparation strategies for objective and essay tests on novels. Another was to measure which annotation or journal writing behaviors correlated with higher scores on the criterion measures. It was found that annotation was more effective for objective test items, but not essays. Writing inferential annotations appeared to be correlated with answering inferential questions correctly. These findings are discussed in relation to Anderson and Armbruster's (1984) conclusion that study strategies which relate more directly to the criterion measures will be more effective than study strategies which do not.