Journal of Educational Psychology 1974, Vol. 66, No. 1, 40-48 EFFECTS OF POSITION AND TYPE OF QUESTION ON LEARNING FROM PROSE MATERIAL: INTERACTION OF TREATMENTS WITH INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES RICHARD J. SHAVELSON 1 Stanford University DAVID C. BERLINER Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development San Francisco, California MICHAEL M. RAVITCH and DAVID LOEDING Stanford University Subjects were randomly assigned to one of four treatment groups: position (before or after) and type (lower order vs. higher order) of question placed in prose material. A control group had no questions in text. Before instruction, subjects received five aptitude tests. Instruction consisted of a 1,525-word prose passage. Immediately after and two weeks following instruction, subjects were tested. Dif- ferences in group means on four measures of achievement usually were statistically significant but, small. A vocabulary test interacted with treatments. Subjects with low vocabulary scores might be assigned to text material with higher order questions placed after a prose passage, while subjects with high vocabulary scores might be assigned to text without questions. The concept of mathemagenic activities (Rothkopf, 1965, 1970) has focused atten- tion on intended and incidental learning as a consequence of adjunct questions inserted within prose material. The effect of question position (before vs. after prose passages) has been examined thoroughly. In general, a consistent facilitative learning effect oc- curs when questions are inserted after rather than before prose passages (Frase, 1968; Rothkopf, 1966; Rothkopf & Bisbicos, 1967). More recently the effects of the type of question (e.g., application, synthesis, or higher order question vs. factual or lower order question) have been explored (Allen, 1970; Hunkins, 1968; Tenenberg, 1969; Watts & Anderson, 1971). For example, Hunkins' data support the hypothesis that higher order questions prompt more thor- 1 Requests for reprints should be sent to Richard J. Shavelson, who is now at the Graduate School of Education, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90024. ough study and cognitive reorganization of the material, while lower order questions influence attention to facts. Similarly, Watts and Anderson found that application ques- tions, as contrasted to questions that re- peated examples or questions on names of significant people, yield the greatest general facilitative effect on learning by prompting the student to inspect and comprehend the text more thoroughly. Carroll (1971), in a review of this area, speculated that "ques- tions are most effective when they not only cause memory search, but also cause some sort of reorganization of memory traces and associations [p. 164]." When mean differences between treatment groups are examined, the effects of position and type of question are statistically sig- nificant, though usually small. But suppose that for particular subjects with similar scores on personality or ability measures, the effects of these variables are quite differ- ent from the effects for some other group of 40