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42 CHAPTER 2the English to the foreign word. For example, the Spanish word for
postal letter is carta. An appropriate image might involve a huge
postal letter being transported to the post office in a shopping cart.
Thus, the word carta would be encoded both as an idea and as an
image. The student’s subsequent attempts to recall the Spanish word
for postal letter will stimulate the image of the letter in the cart, pro-
viding a concrete cue to the correct word. This method has been
shown to have significant success in teaching foreign vocabulary.
Elaboration strategies for more complex learning from texts include
paraphrasing, summarizing, creating analogies, writing notes in one’s
own words, and asking and answering questions. When someone asks
us to elaborate on an idea we have expressed in discussion, he or she
wants us to add more information to what we have said to provide
detail, give examples, make connections to other issues, or draw infer-
ences from the data. The additional information makes our point
more meaningful to the listener and also is likely to make the point
easier to remember.
Table 2.1 lists two terms—note taking and note making (i.e., devel-
oping questions from notes). Writing notes directly from a lecture is
a rehearsal strategy, but asking questions and underlining the answers
in the notes (note making) is an elaboration strategy. Chapter 9 dis-
cusses that what is done with notes after a lecture is just as impor-
tant as taking the notes in the first place. In that chapter, you will
learn how to develop questions from your notes so you can check
your understanding of lecture material.
We can elaborate when learning more complex information. As
information enters WM, the successful learner thinks about the infor-
mation: What does this new information mean? How does it relate
to other ideas in the text and other information already learned? What
type of analogies or examples can I generate?
A student learning that ancient Egyptian society depended on slav-
ery may elaborate on this fact by adding details, making connections
with other information, or drawing inferences. By way of providing
detail, the student may notice that Egyptian slaves were largely pris-
oners of war. The student may connect the concept of Egyptian slav-
ery with what is known of antebellum U.S. slavery, noting similarities
and differences. The student may infer that life for an Egyptian slave
was hard and held cheaply by Egyptian society at large. In this way,
the learner integrates the new ideas into LTM by associating the new
data with the old knowledge (Bransford, 1979). This procedure leads
to improved understanding of the material and to an increased prob-
ability that the information will be remembered at a later time.
The following are other examples of analogies that promote con-
nections between new ideas and existing student knowledge (cited in
Ormrod, 1995):