Interaction of Dogmatism and Rhetorical Structure in Text Recall

Recent theory suggests that skilled readers attempt to identify the rhetorical structure of a passage and then use it to encode and retrieve text information. While a comparison structure normally yields more recall than a collection structure, we reasoned that rote learning-oriented high dogmatics may recall better with a simple collection structure and conceptual learning-oriented low dogmatics may recall better with the more organized comparison structure. Using 44 high and 44 low dogmatic college-age learners, the results indicated an interaction between dogmatism and rhetorical structure that was generally supportive of our hypothesis.