APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY VOL 12 617 623 1998 Context Dependent Memory for Meaningful Material Information for Students HARRY M GRANT LANE C BREDAHL JOHN CLAY JENNIFER FERRIE JANE E GROVES TIMOTHY A McDORMAN and VERONICA J DARK Iowa State University USA SUMMARY Context dependency e ects on memory for lists of unrelated words have been shown more often with recall than with recognition Context dependency for meaningful text material was examined using two standard academic testing techniques short answer recall and multiple choice recognition Forty participants read an article in either silent or noisy conditions their reading comprehension was assessed with both types of test under silent or noisy conditions Both tests showed context dependency e ects in which performance was better in the matching conditions silent study silent test and noisy study noisy test than in the mismatching conditions silent study noisy test and noisy study silent test Context cues appear to be important in the retrieval of newly learned meaningful information An academic application is that students may perform better on exams by studying in silence 1998 John Wiley Sons Ltd Appl Cognit Psychol 12 617 623 1998 Environmental context dependency e ects occur when there is better performance on a memory test when the test occurs in the same environment in which the to beremembered material was originally studied the matching condition than when the test occurs in a di erent environment the mismatching condition The literature contains many instances of context dependency e ects for recall e g Godden and Baddeley 1975 Jerabek and Standing 1992 Martin and Aggleton 1993 McDaniel et al 1989 Smith 1979 Smith Standing and de Man 1992 see Smith 1988 for a comprehensive review see Fernandez and Glenberg 1985 for exceptions Context dependency e ects for recall memory are typically interpreted as showing that the characteristics of the environment are encoded as part of the memory trace and can be used to enhance retrieval of the other information in the trace e g Eich 1980 Smith 1988 Context dependency e ects for recognition also have been found e g Canas and Nelson 1986 Smith 1985 1986 Smith and Vela 1992 but the literature contains mixed results in that many studies do not show such e ects e g Bell et al 1984 Godden and Baddeley 1980 Smith Vela and Williamson 1988 The fact that context dependency e ects are more easily obtained with recall tests than with recognition tests has been used to suggest that there are di erences in the retrieval processes Correspondence to Veronica J Dark Department of Psychology Iowa State University Ames IA 50011 3180 USA CCC 0888 4080 98 060617 07 17 50 1998 John Wiley Sons Ltd Accepted 11 December 1997 618 H M Grant et al involved in the two types of tests Smith s 1988 outshining hypothesis for example suggested that recognition items themselves act as such strong retrieval cues copy cues that they overshadow or outshine the relatively weak contribution of environmental context cues Smith 1986 suggested that conditions emphasizing more meaningful encoding might mask any e ects of environmental context at test even for recall because such encoding would produce retrieval cues that would outshine context as a retrieval cue also see McDaniel et al 1989 Although Smith s 1988 review pointed out that most of the research assessing context dependency e ects have used lists of unrelated words as the to be remembered material the review included ve studies that examined the e ect of changing classrooms on exam performance Only one published study Metzger et al 1979 reported that switching rooms harmed performance while three published studies Abernethy 1940 Farnsworth 1934 Sau ey Otaka and Bravaresco 1986 reported that it did not Smith noted however that students actually study for exams in many di erent environments so that there was a potential mismatch between study and test context even when students were tested in their regular classroom and that an unpublished study Mellgren 1984 which did control both the study and test environments showed context dependency Thus Smith 1988 concluded that the extent to which environmental context a ected retrieval of meaningful material was unresolved We were interested in determining whether environmental context dependency e ects would be found with the type of material and the type of tests typically encountered in school For practical reasons our focus was more on study conditions than on di erences in classroom testing conditions Students have more control over their study environments than over their test environments It was our collective observation that many high school and college students study material in environments very di erent from those in which they are tested The study environments often include background music or background noise from either family friends or television while the test environments are typically quieter If context dependency occurs with meaningful course material then students study habits could be harming their test performance We chose to manipulate the presence or absence of general background noise rather than to manipulate the presence or absence of background music because people vary widely in the type of music they prefer To distinguish between contextdependency e ects and the possibility that background noise simply interferes with encoding see Bell et al 1984 a factorial design was used in which both the study context and the test context were varied Participants read a two page article under silent or noisy conditions and were then tested under matching or mismatching conditions The tests were designed to mimic standard classroom tests and thus assessed comprehension of new material i e memory for meaning rather than verbatim memory of what was studied Because of the possibility that context dependency e ects might di er with di erent types of tests participants completed both a shortanswer recall test and a multiple choice recognition test METHOD Participants Eight members of a psychology laboratory class served as experimenters Each experimenter recruited ve acquaintances to serve as participants There were 39 participants 1998 John Wiley Sons Ltd Appl Cognit Psychol 12 617 623 1998 Context dependent memory 619 ranging in age from 17 to 56 years M 23 4 SD 5 9 and there were 17 females and 23 males Design Study context silent versus noisy and test context silent versus noisy were manipulated in a