The power of imagination and perspective in learning from science text.

In 2 experiments, college students read a 4-paragraph text on how the human circulatory system works and were instructed to form a mental image of the events described in each paragraph from the perspective of their own body (first-person perspective group) or from the perspective of a fictitious person facing them (third-person perspective group), or were given no imagination instructions (control group). Students who imagined from a first-person perspective outperformed the control group on solving transfer problems, retaining important material, and not retaining unimportant material in Experiments 1 and 2, confirming the benefits of combining imagination and perspective into a powerful learning strategy. Students who imagined from a first-person perspective outperformed students who imagined from a third-person perspective on solving transfer problems in Experiments 1 and 2, indicating the value of adding first-person perspective to imagination for fostering deeper understanding. Students who imagined from a third-person perspective outperformed the control group on solving transfer problems and on not retaining unimportant material in Experiment 1 (which included specific prompts for which items to include in one’s images), whereas they did not perform significantly better than the control group on any measures in Experiment 2 (which did not include specific prompts). This finding suggests that imagination without first-person perspective can be ineffective when there ...

Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - October 18, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research