The relative effectiveness of four typographic cueing techniques

Typographic Cueing is a method whereby typographic methods such as changing print styles are used to emphasize or “cue” specific information. The independent variables used in this experiment were 1) cued or noncued material, 2) the method of typographic cueing (capitalizing, italicizing, boldfacing and underlining) and 3) the type of material cued (principles, examples or trivia). The dependent measure was the number of errors subjects made to written questions. Within each article the subjects read twelve statements selected for possible cueing. Four were principles, four were examples and four were trivia. Two statements of the same type were cued in each article. The remaining ten statements were considered as noncued, adjacent material. Each subject read three different articles, all having the same method of cueing, but each cueing a different type of material. Subjects were screened for reading ability. Each subject then began the three experimental trials. Each trial consisted of reading a 300 word article once, and then, without being allowed to refer back to the article, answering the twelve true/false and multiple choice questions on the article. Subjects were randomly assigned to conditions. The articles and material type cued were counterbalanced across subjects. All four cueing techniques were found to produce significant isolation (cueing) effect. There were no significant differences between the isolation effects created by the different cueing techniques on the cued material. Further analyses suggested that the capitalized and italicized print cueing techniques resulted in a greater retention of noncued material. No significant differences were found among these cueing techniques. Material type cued was not a significant variable for comparing the cueing techniques.