The use of individually administered measures of intelligence and other cognitive abilities requires clinicians to monitor a client's test behaviors, given the need for a client to be engaged fully, attentive, and cooperative during the testing process. The use of standardized and norm-referenced measures of test-taking behaviors facilitates this…

Gestalt psychologists proposed two distinct learning mechanisms. Associative learning occurs gradually through the repeated co-occurrence of external stimuli or memories. Insight learning occurs suddenly when people discover new relationships within their prior knowledge as a result of reasoning or problem solving processes that re-organize or…

The major purpose of this study was to test how preliterate learners use illustrations in storybooks to understand a story. Subjects were 23 five-year-old low-SES children, learning Dutch as a second language. Each child was exposed four times to a digital picture storybook. Five books were used and counterbalanced over children and repetitions.…

Examines answer selection within the framework of QUEST, a psychological model of question answering that specifies how knowledge structures are searched during question answering. Examines whether both "legal" and "illegal" answers were activated during the search. Finds support for QUEST's arc-search procedures associated…

Investigates the influence of vocal intonation on five- and seven-year-old children's processing of explicit and implicit text concepts. Assesses comprehension of narratives through cued recall, recognition, and free recall tasks. Concludes that young children assign more weight to vocal information in making assessments of story outcome than do…

Uses Kintsch's proposition-based construction-integration theory of discourse comprehension to detail the user coding operations that occur in each of the three subsystems (Perception, Comprehension, Application) in which users process an information retrieval systems (IRS) message. Describes an IRS device made up of two separate parts that enable…

Presents a model of information processing that demonstrates how to facilitate knowledge acquisition. Various instructional strategies designed to reduce the effect of impositions are described, such as use of novelty, mystery, and questioning techniques; reducing complexity of instructional messages; and the automaticity of secondary skills. (JKP)

Explores the social correlates of the interpretive abilities of young children to assess televised narratives. Demonstrates negative correlations between amount of television viewed by parents and children's television comprehension, indicating that the more parents viewed television, the worse their children performed on comprehension tests.…

These conference papers discuss the history of reading and readability research in the Navy, contemporary literacy research in the Navy, and research dealing with the readability and comprehensibility of written materials used in training or on the job. The first paper traces the interest in and development of literacy training in the Navy from…

The four papers in this collection discuss language perception and comprehension and report on experiments in those areas. The first paper, "The Influence of Non-Linguistic Knowledge on Perceiving and Verifying Sentences," discusses the reliance of language perception and comprehension on the interaction of linguistic and world…

The way information is visually designed and synthesized greatly affects how people understand and use that information. Increased use of the World Wide Web as a teaching tool makes it imperative to question how visual/verbal information presented via the Web can increase or restrict understanding. The purpose of this study was to examine…