Background/Context: Educators, parents, politicians, and the media often complain that young people know little history and compare them unfavorably to better-educated, earlier generations. However, the charge is exaggerated. Young people have performed poorly on history tests for decades. Students' poor scores on one test in particular, the focus…

This report examines the effects of exposure to various elements of a civics curriculum on civic participation, two forms of political knowledge, internal political efficacy, political cynicism, news elaboration, discussion elaboration and various forms of interpersonal and mediated political communication behaviors. The data are based on a…

The authors conducted 3 experiments addressing the issue of how observations and multiple sources of prior knowledge are put together in category learning. In Experiments 1 and 2, learning was faster for critical features, which were predictable on the basis of prior knowledge, than for filler features, and this advantage increased as more…

Three learning modules are described and investigated as they reflect different students' conceptions of and approaches to learning. The Schoolwork Module (SWM) focuses on task performance and involves a passive, incremental, piecemeal, and rote memory method of learning, parallel to what might be implied by the Information Processing model of…