Analogical comparison of 2 provided cases promotes spontaneous analogical transfer by encouraging a more abstract representation of a target principle. This is widely understood as a process of schema abstraction that aids retrieval from memory in the absence of superficial similarity. The category status hypothesis states that if knowledge about…

This study explores changes in students' strategies as they solve different types of volume problems. Fifth graders were presented with pictures showing 3D objects and a unit cube; they determined how many cubes made up the object and explained their responses. We examined whether children transferred strategies across problem types, varying in…

The purpose of the present study was to test the efficacy of a visuospatial working memory (WM) training in terms of its transfer effects and maintenance effects, in the young-old and old-old. Forty young-old and 40 old-old adults took part in the study. Twenty participants in each age group received training with a visuospatial WM task, whereas…

This article demonstrates how a set of complementary qualitative methods can be used to construct a detailed picture not only of the nature of young people's representations of a distant place but the processes of learning by which such representations develop over the medium term. The analysis is based on an interpretive case study of a class of…

Research on memory functions and their applications is a vast field that has unfolded for decades; some important studies are sixty years old. However, the research has remained a well-kept secret of cognitive psychologists. Education faculties rarely teach memory specifics, so people working in education typically do not know about the above…

Investigations related to expertise in problem solving and ability to transfer learning from one context to another are important for developing strategies to help students perform more expertlike tasks. Here we analyze written responses to a pair of nonintuitive isomorphic problems given to introductory physics students and discussions with a…

Forty-seven reading disabled children whose major reading problem was comprehension participated in a study to examine the effects of interventions designed to structure information in encoding and recall through the use of categorization strategy. Short term treatment consisted of four tutorials over a 2-week period. Long term treatment 1…

Applies to the inclined-plane task Siegler's (1981) observation that performance on Piagetian tasks is governed by similar rule structures. Also replicates Siegler's original observations about the development on the balance-scale task and determines the consistency in children's rule usage across tasks. (Author/AS)

Children often perseverate, repeating prior behaviors when inappropriate. This work tested the roles of verbal labels and stimulus novelty in such perseveration. Three-year-old children sorted cards by one rule and were then instructed to switch to a second rule. In a basic condition, cards had familiar shapes and colors and both rules were stated…

When taught to link sorting to self-instruction ("I'm looking for blue triangles") children show perfect accuracy in sorting. This study investigated if this performance would generalize to new stimuli. One participant showed near-perfect generalization to all new stimulus sets (shapes, letters, pictures); two had difficulty with…

How strategies affect learning of categories that lack necessary and sufficient attributes is explored. The authors propose that strategy variations induced by instructions affect only the amount of information represented about attributes, not processes operating on representations. An experiment required subjects to classify schematic faces into…

The effects of two types of advance organizer small group instruction, expository (EO) and guided self-discovery (GSDO) were assessed in teaching the concrete operational skills of either hierarchical classification or relations to preschool children. A control group was taught using the same materials, in a manner determined by the children's…

This paper reports two experiments which examined processes involved in children's ability to solve class inclusion problems of the form, "Are there more A' (subclass) or more A (class)?" In the first experiment a total of 216 children in age groups 5, 7 and 9 years were placed in three conditions which were designed to distinguish…

Presents a classification scheme applicable to systematic instructional design, which partitions the cognitive domain into the four levels of knowledge, understanding, mental processes, and strategies, each of which encompasses specific instructional objectives. Guidelines are offered to assist in the design and construction of these instructional…