The effects of levels of elaboration on learners’ strategic processing of text Michele Dornisch • Rayne A. Sperling • Jill A. Zeruth Received: 1 January 2009 / Accepted: 21 September 2009 / Published online: 13 October 2009 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 Abstract In the current work, we examined learners’ comprehension when engaged with elaborative processing strategies. In Experiment 1, we randomly assigned students to one of five elaborative processing conditions and addressed differences in learners’ lower- and higher-order learning outcomes and ability to employ elaborative strategies. Findings indicated no significant differences among conditions on learning outcomes. However, learners better able to employ elaborative processing strategies performed better on out- come measures. Experiment 2 extended this research and addressed whether there would be differences across elaborative processing conditions in learners’ comprehension at delayed testing. We also examined the role of motivation in performance and strategy use. Findings indicated no differences on the outcome measures at delayed testing; however, there were significant differences in learners’ performance on an integration outcome at immediate testing. In addition, significant positive correlations were indicated for several outcome measures, strategy use and mastery orientation. Future research should further consider instructional scaffolds to promote learners’ strategic processing and critical individual difference variables as they effect elaborative processing. Keywords Elaborative interrogation Á Learning strategies Á Elaboration Á Motivation Á Comprehension Introduction Learners often lack text comprehension strategies that facilitate their construction of complete knowledge representations of expository text. This is particularly problematic when the text presents many new concepts as well as relationships among concepts (e.g., Graesser et al. 2002), which is a common format for many texts college students read for M. Dornisch (&) Long Island University, Brookville, NY, USA e-mail: mdorn@liu.edu R. A. Sperling Á J. A. Zeruth The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA 123 Instr Sci (2011) 39:1–26 DOI 10.1007/s11251-009-9111-z