Learning of contextual skills: effects of the presence/absence of the instructional objective and the referent object

Abstract

This experimental study analyses didactic interactions which might promote learning of basic contextual competencies, operationally defined as identification tasks, through reading a didactic text. Thirty two undergraduate students were randomly assigned to four groups to explore the effects of an instruction conveying what was expected from the participant to learn (instructional objective) and of an illustration of the object referred by the text (referent object), when both factors were present (Group 1), when only one of them was present (Group 2 and 3), and when both factors were absent (Group 4). The effects were tested on two different tasks: object identification and textual identification. The presence or absence of the instructional objective failed to produce significant performance differences among groups in none of the tasks tested, independently of the referent object’s presence or absence. However, significant performance differences were found in object identification as an effect of the presence and absence of the referent object, no matter if the instructional objective was present or absent, but this effect was not observed under the same conditions in the textual identification task. Results strongly suggest that the presence of the referent object during an instructional episode is necessary for contextualization of names and referents. The presence of the instructional objective did not produce important effects on learning, but the presence of the referent object did facilitate learning of this kind of competencies.