Reviews concepts proposed by researchers in linguistics, psychology, philosophy, and artificial intelligence, who have applied their knowledge and skills to the study of human information processing--i.e., memory content, storage, encoding, and retrieval. Guidelines derived from theory for use by instructional designers and subject specialists in…

This study investigates the effects of content sequence on student learning. The treatments, a spatial and conceptual instructional sequence each consisting of identical content elements, were administered to students in a two-year college Botany course. Hypotheses tested were that sequence would have an effect on student perceptions of the…

Different kinds of basic knowledge and strategies necessary for comprehension are examined in three radically different domains: (1) the stories, (2) mathematical problems, and (3) electronic circuits. From analyzing the comprehension processes in these different domains, similarities have emerged in the role of planning knowledge and the…

The experiments reviewed in this paper give strong reasons for concluding that the order in which things are learned, the range of exemplification of structural principles, and the introduction of a carefully judged amount of conflict may be critical to reaching an appropriate kind and level of learning. (Author/SJL)

Reports on students' study and drawing of five electronic circuit diagrams. Concludes that the success of the students depended upon the amount of detail in the instructional diagrams. (RT)