Tested the hypothesis that practice has a positive effect on several kinds of student learning in a functional marriage course. The major finding in the data was that a workbook type of practice had a significant and important short-term and long-term effect on students' ability to apply abstract ideas. (Author)

Recent publications of longitudinal and sequential analyses of psychometric data have been cited as evidence for "the myth of intellectual decline" with age. This term "myth" has been interpreted by many gerontologists to mean that intellectual functioning does not decline even late in life (except shortly before death). Furthermore, this…

Two experiments investigated the role of children's spontaneous conceptual "biases" in pictorial discrimination learning. The results suggested that such biases may serve either to facilitate or to interfere with discrimination learning. Moreover, in each experiment, age by treatment interactions revealed that in comparison to the behavior of…

Implications for affective education are drawn from an empirical study of 60 upper-middle socioeconomic class 6 to 15 year-olds' responses to questions asking how videotaped actors felt. Percentage frequencies of category use in tape-recorded transcripts coded by two judges revealed no differences by child's sex. Marked developmental differences…

Subjects (n=24), 12 of whom were in the age range of 18-30 years and 12 of whom were between 55-65 years, performed two semantic memory tasks. Results suggested that subjects in the older group may have retrieved information faster than the young subjects, but that they required longer to decide upon a response. (Author)

The primary purpose of this study was to determine empirically whether an individual's cognitive style differentially influences his hypothesizing behavior within a relatively simple information processing task. A characteristic of cognitive style explored is the manner in which an individual perceives and analyzes a stimulus configuration;…

This study examined possible relationships between the analytic/global dimension of cognitive style, as defined by Davis and Klausmeier (1970) and measured by the Children's Embedded Figures Test (CEFT), and two modes of instruction varying in the level of guidance provided the learner. Sixty Anglo subjects (eight and nine years old), identified…

This study explores how an individual's cognitive style influences the development of a strategy in a concept identification task and how an individual tests his hypotheses in a concept learning set task. Subjects for the research were given the Hidden Figures Test as a means of identifying their cognitive styles. Half of the subjects were…

This report presents research concerned with two information-processing constructs, "cognitive strategies" and "cognitive styles." Study one analyzes thinking-aloud protocols obtained from a female undergraduate doing anagram problems. Several major strategies are described, along with basic "Operators" subject used to construct and modify…

One hundred and sixty-two subjects of three age levels were tested to examine the relationship between crystallized and fluid abilities and three problem solving tasks varying in the abstractness/concreteness of their stimuli and emphasis on past experience. These dimensions have been used by Davis to distinguish between Type "O" and Type "C"…

A battery of memory tests was administered to 243 male university students. Factor analysis with oblique rotation of factors revealed five factors: (1) associative memory (particularly important in paired-associate tests), (2) short-term visual memory (the ability to derive information from briefly presented visual displays), (3) meaningful memory…

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…

A study was performed to investigate the storage and retrieval dynamics that occur during paired-associate acquisition by means of the storage-retrieval separation technique discussed recently by Chechile & Meyer (1976). Thirty subjects learned an 18-item paired-associate list to a criterion of three perfect trials. In the test phase of each…

This report documents a series of studies on how undergraduate students learn from and reason with textual information. The studies described were undertaken to produce models that could serve as the basis for designing computer systems capable of structuring and presenting text material in optimal formats. Divided into sections, the report…

Mandler (1969) found that one-third of adult subjects were seriators and two-thirds were categorizers in a task where either strategy could be employed. Study 1 was a replication of his procedure with children from Grades 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9. While there was weak evidence that some older subjects chose the categorial strategy, there was little…